That isn't actually the choice being made here-- tiny blocks are created even when there is plenty of reasonably high fee paying backlog.

At an instant this is true, but the empty block still serves to increase the difficulty and reduce the rate of block finding in the next interval. If it happens on an ongoing basis it does reduce capacity.


Unfortunately the parties producing small blocks do so because they haven't validated the prior block. So they add only a false confirmation and erode the security of lite clients rather than contributing to security as empty blocks did in prior years before this practice became common.

Not just done in Bitcoin, but we came up with that improvement; and ripple borrowed it long after-- including the code for it. I put him on ignore after that post: There is nothing worse to deal with in this subforum than a chest-thumping altcoin promoter bragging about an altcoin being superior on the basis of code or techniques they coped from Bitcoin Core.

This article is overtly dishonest. I rebutted it on reddit. I think it's shameful that Tom is either so ignorant or so outrageously dishonest to have published such a thing.

You probably aren't accepting inbound connections, or are potentially in a /16 with many other nodes so you are connected to less often.   About 300GB/month transfer is not atypical for a node with inbound connections.

BIP152 reduces the data used to send blocks, but that data was only about 12% of the overall.

The amount of uncorrected lies in this thread is really absurd.

Segwit doesn't have anything to do with lightning. Lightning is already possible without it and can't be blocked. So if you're against having actual scalablity in Bitcoin: well too bad and fuck you: you already lost the day Satoshi released the software.  Similar, sidechains at least of the federated type are existing, unblockable, and undetectable.  If you want to force other people to not use them? Again too bad. You can't.


BitcoinBarrel, the notice in your software has nothing to do with segwit.  You're inconsistent with the network because you're not even running something that implements CSV.  You should at least run 0.13.0; if you do you won't get a notice until segwit activates.


I am not aware of any change here, have you opened an issue? https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/

In my experience very few businesses are running full nodes; instead they mostly rely on third party APIs.

Many developers do not run nodes which are reachable to the outside world-- uses a lot of bandwidth.

Most miners use pools and do not run a full node at all.

You should evaluate if your software decisions are consistent with best practices for selecting cryptographic software (see a talk I gave on the subject (third section) at https://youtu.be/Gs9lJTRZCDc?t=2240); or if you're taking potentially dangerous code that you found on the internet because its superficial feature set sounded good.

Then Xio is being untruthful. (also-- what Doxing? I removed any mention of his name once I found out it even might be against Reddit policy, even though I wasn't linking it to any other account!)

I responded back with a copy of a written statement from hashfast that said something like "yes in the event that we fail to deliver we will return your XX Bitcoins, not the price of the devices we understand the the price of bitcoin is volatile." and asked them politely to explain the discrepancy between our clearly stated written agreement and what they were sending. Not even a response. Shameful business practices.

And you claim I influenced others? AFAIK, morci's lawsuit began months before I had any complaint, when hashfast slipped its first targets.

I just saw this now, but it should be clear I have _never_ been party to any litigation against hashfast.  They tried to send me a "refund" check that was totally at odds with our clear written agreement so I returned it, when I complained they never even responded.  They never sent me any hardware.  I chose to not litigate because the time and risk to my personal safety couldn't possibly be compensated by whatever tiny amount I could get out of the clearly bankrupt company which had since managed to dispose of most of its valuable assets.

The fact that people apparently associated wish Hashfast keep harassing me over the internet is seriously irritating, however.

Dude. Explicit agreement. Without it I would not have bought. This is a clear reliance.  And-- it's also not a "windfall", as hashfast claimed they would put the assets aside. (And apparently did so, since they had no problem paying Cypherdoc 3000 BTC) -- strange to see you argue this here, while not arguing that cypherdoc was entitled to "only" three hundred grand rather than the much larger "windfall" he was actually paid. It was also equally explicit that if the Bitcoin price dropped to $1 or whatever, I'd still just be getting back the Bitcoins I paid.

Consider: You own 10,000 tons of steel and expect the price of steel to go up a lot but aren't doing much of anything with your steel right now.  Someone offers to sell you a machine that will, given time and inexpensive feedstocks return something between 5000 and 25000 tons of steel, likely 15000 tons... but only if delivered on time.  They offer to sell it for your 10,000 tons of steel... but you're concerned that they'll just do nothing and hand you the market price of the steel at the time of the sale back if the steel price goes up since that has been a common scam pattern. So they agree that they'll have third party investors pay for the production, and if they fail to deliver on spec they'll return your payment.   Absent fraud this is a good trade... the risk that the machine might end up producing less is acceptable to you, and they sweetened it even further by offering that if it significantly under-produces they'll give you an additional machine later (most of their costs are NRE-- machines are marginally cheap to produce).  The seller get a good deal because-- assuming he can deliver-- he gets a guaranteed return instead of a machine with an uncertain income an a bunch of operating requirements. So you go for it.

Later, they don't deliver and try to cut you a check for the market prices at the time of the sale. The very situation you were concerned about and which you sought and obtained multiple copies in writing, explicit agreement otherwise.-- and made it very clear that you would not buy without this agreement.

This is hogwash, and if people can get away with it the result is a trivially repeatable scam pattern:   Collect Bitcoin for mining pre-orders at prices almost too good to be true, later when the bitcoin price goes up: "refund" the market value of the coins at the time of the "sale"; otherwise if the Bitcoin price goes down-- "refund" the exact Bitcoins paid. Heads I win, tails you lose.  Yes, in HF's case they did actually attempt to build hardware, but that doesn't change the general pattern.

To call that a "windfall" is to make a mockery of contract. If this hadn't been explicitly agreed in advance as a condition of the sale then maybe there would be an argument, but here it was clearly agreed. The only limit on the enforceability of the agreement is insolvency of the entity that made it, which was sadly the case here (esp with Cypherdoc walking off with so much of the Bitcoins).

After it went sour and I negatively rated him, he contacted me directly and said his only compensation was discounts for hardware which he never received and that he was just as much of a victim as me, he plead at my sense of justice and I fell for it. So, indeed, I was not amused when I read the court documents and found out that he got 3000 BTC and full price refunds for the "discounted hardware". So much for "transparency" unless you mean transparently dishonest.

He argued before a California court that he was the "LeBron James of Bitcoin"; and that on this basis the payment of 3000 BTC (10% of gross income) was more than justified.  Are you saying he perjured himself?

Except... it isn't there.

My information cannot be found in the public bankruptcy proceedings. I specifically did not participate to keep that information out of them; because the at most few thousand I could have conceivably gotten out of the defunct entity was far less than the cost of security precautions necessitated by the publication of the information-- better the funds go to people who need them more.


Bullshit.  But feel free to file a lawsuit. Otherwise pound sand.  You're the one arguing that you paid Cypherdoc hundreds of thousands of dollars for effectively nothing. I wasn't even specifically arguing that tunneling was engaged in here: only that you bought and paid for his reputation (and thus he shouldn't be surprised that it's trashed when hashfast failed to make good on its agreements) or that he was paid an astronomical amount of funds for some other reason.  E.g. If it wasn't buying the reputation of a public figure ("LeBron James of Bitcoin") to endorse the product, -- then what was it?

Let me make this completely clear here:  There was clear dishonestly here and it is unambiguous, while the this and that details may not rise to the level of criminal conviction and the successfully dispersed funds make civil action a waste of time, no one involved has any right to demand the affection or respect of others.  You can sit here impotently threatening with bullshit litigation on behalf of your buddy, but I won't be cowed by it.  All doing so does is piss me off and encourage me to make it more clear what a ripoff I believe the whole operation was.


But you know all this, quoting you from elsewhere on Bitcointalk:


We agree-- that if an agreement was X bitcoin, it should be honored as that for better or worse-- and that cypherdoc was granted a windfall in exchange for his reputation, so why do you seem to have forgotten your prior position?

I have a written contract from hashfast saying that if they failed to deliver I would receive a full refund of the amount of BTC paid. I directly reached out to Simon Barber to double check this fact, due to the frequent mining scams that had previously happened where there was no intention to create mining hardware but simply to refund "dollars" if Bitcoin appreciated, and Bitcoins if the market moved the other direction. Cypherdoc also confirmed hashfast's refund policies in public.  Without those assurances I never would have made a purchase, just as I never purchased from BFL, and the same is true for many other early hashfast buyers.

What you call a "windfall" was a significant loss (something like 80%? I don't recall) in fact, beyond what hashfast had promised. This isn't just me yapping-- a california court also held that there was significant evidence of fraudulent behavior on this point.

The questions are simple: Did hashfast promise early buyers that they were externally funded without need of customer funds to build goods, and that in the event of a failure to deliver they'd simply return the Bitcoin paid? Yes.  Did Cypherdoc get paid 3000 BTC (even of his agreement worth  _over three hundred of thousand dollars_) to make a couple dozen forum posts laying out his reputation vouching for the operation? Yes. Did people rely on Hashfast and its agents promises and send them funds instead of other oppturnities (such as sitting on them, or spending them with other mining operations)? Obviously. Did the operation substantially both fail to deliver and fail to return the payments to the customers it agreed to do that with? Yes.  Did Cypherdoc's removal of 3000 BTC from the organization make it physically impossible for them to return the Bitcoins-- it appears so.  Did Cypherdoc lie to myself and others about his level of involvement (claiming to have lost funds) until forced to tell the truth by a California court? Yes. Could Cyperdoc largely have recovered much of his reputation by voluntarily returning the funds he removed to the bankruptcy or the customers, minus an actually reasonable payment for a few hours of message posting-- quite likely.

Cypherdoc has repeated posted my personal information gleamed from hashfast records, including my shipping address-- great fodder for the nutbags threatening my life, no doubt--  If he thought any of my behaviors were illegal he'd certainly be able to begin litigation.  Give me a break.

The guy traded his reputation for a huge windfall, he has nothing to cry about.  No one's reputation is worth anything if someone's reputation isn't trashed if they put it on the line to promote something and that thing turns out to be a major loss for all involved. That is what you paid him for, unless you want to argue that he was paid 3000 BTC for something _other_ than putting a valuable reputation on the line? (such as, say, tunneling funds out of the company?).   Besides, regardless of the shenanigans at hashfast, he directly lied to me-- claiming that he was just another customer paid by discounted units, which never shipped leaving him at a loss too-- to try to evade a reputational hit. On that basis alone I don't have any reservation in saying that he's a dishonest coward.  

And bringing it back on-topic-- AFAICT, there is NO post on Reddit where I disclose any personal information about him. And the reddit administration already confirmed that the issue in question was the gavinandresen@gmail.com email address.

The post was alleging that I, specifically, utilized a cryotgraphic key to perform some act that the author thought was improper.  This is simply a lie. I responded on reddit answering that lie and my post was deleted, and ultimately my account suspended over that factual correction.   It would be helpful if franky1 would acknowledge that. And as far as the subject of this thread goes-- that is about all that matters.

In terms of the notice,  It was written by Gavin, not I.  And it no longer exists in Bitcoin Core since it was removed a year ago for version 0.12-- it was replaced with the far more informative messages I linked above, which is not tainted by the authoritarian and centralized thinking that anything other than the very latest version is automatically obsolete.

If you don't like the content of the old text-- don't take it up with me, I didn't write it and I contributed to removing it.

If you don't like that something was displayed, don't take it up with me-- I had nothing at all to do with it.

On the plus side of all this obnoxiousness, I do believe you've perpetually lost the ability to argue that any node is ever silently downgraded by a BIP9-using softfork.  So at least there is that-- how many hundreds of hours of 'argument' by franky1 does that moot?  I giggle at the enormity of that count.

And you're free to decide what to do-- accept it without a careful check, since it looks like a fruit and smells okay from where you stand-- or take action to verify it completely. It's your decision.   Sadly, with your hardfork mania you want to take away people's ability to decide by forcing changes onto them which they can't ignore even if they want to, and by driving up the resource costs of running a full node so that many were will exist, checking anything at all.

THERE IS NO ALERT THERE.

The poster claims that I abusively sent an alert to try to cause node to upgrade. But I did not, I took no action, and what he is seeing is not an alert.

The message the person was posting about is the message (older) full nodes display when they detect that most of the hashpower is enforcing rules they don't know about.  It isn't an alert, it's a notice generated by the software itself. And not one I created: I showed the commit message where it was created in my response.

The tremendous irony is that you and other fudsters have spent untold hours fearmongering with claims that full nodes would some how be silently 'downgraded' by segwit, and ignored all prior points that full nodes can detect the new rules and will tell their users about them so they can choose their response.  (Current Bitcoin Core uses text which is much less obnoxious than Gavin's, but warns all the same).

The security of a Bitcoin wallet doesn't come from any secrecy of its code. I would say a wallet with any secret code cannot be assumed to be secure.

The entirety of the Bitcoin download can be reproduced by anyone and in fact the release process requires many different people to reproduce the binaries exactly from source on their own.

rbtc can't tell people that it's being done because then they'd have to admit that they too moderate things, which would break their narrative that the difference between rbtc and rbitcoin is that rbtc is 'uncensored'.

Apparently one that defines Gavin Andresen as not a public figure but defines me as one (since no action is taken about the basically daily stream of attack comments naming me on rbtc-- ... though I never asked for any action to be taken with respect to them other than letting me post rebuttals, but they've taken that away.)


But whatever, it's their site-- they can have dumb rules.

Egads. I was saying the exact opposite of you can't connect to non-segwit nodes. In repeated loud text. You can and do.

But once segwit activates you cannot request blocks from them, because they don't provide the witness data that you need to verify the blocks.


95% is regard to hashpower. Hashpower is not listening node count.


Is in a perfectly fine state. They'll preferentially connect to other segwit capable nodes (about 40% of reachable peers), but if they can't find enough (or if addnoded/connected otherwise) they'll happily connect to what they can.


Bitcoin Classic dev scam would be more accurate, you should pay attention to who writes things. The author of that "proposal" (which has never even had a BIP written for it) is well known for behavior like that in my circles. Then again, it's absurd that you supported something that hardly gave a clear description of what it would do-- beyond hand more power to miners which I suppose served your "pocket financial requirements" well enough that you didn't even care about the details.


Segwit doesn't have much to do with lightning, but good job showing that you've been brainwashed by rbtc. AFAIK no regular contributors to the Bitcoin project stand to gain financially from lightning on Bitcoin, except by virtue of the Bitcoin currency itself becoming a lot more valuable because of more options for using it.

To be clear, the bottom post originally had "Marc Lowe" in the place of that first "he"-- I yanked it shortly after making the post in an abundance of caution: I wasn't able to find any example where simply using a name not connected to any other identity or identifying information has ever been determined to be a violation of Reddit's policy, and I can find a great many posts where people name and shame others who've ripped them off-- but I had no desire to violate any rule and being more specific was pointless (everyone it matters to already knows) so I removed it, after someone suggested that it might be.   None of the response of Reddit which anyone has received has suggested this had anything to do with it.

Here is the post that I was banned for-- no joke:  https://people.xiph.org/~greg/temp/rbtc_wtf_part_27.png

It looks like what happened is that BitcoinXio reported it to the site administrators before realizing how transparently dishonest his explanation was-- since my post contained nothing but totally public information, published by the subject of it, which is part of a open source project distributed everywhere was, and which would cause no one any harm.  

There has since been a lot of misinformation spread about this-- one point reported is the claim that I was lying about the git commit message in my post.  I pretty frequently edit my posts to add links and details; in this case I initially created the post saying that this message that the author was accusing me of creating was actually created by Gavin. Then shortly after I edited it to include the whole commit message because the commit message actually contained the notice. As far as I know, I'd added that well before BicoinXio deleted my message--  but because I couldn't actually see the deletion myself. In any case, it was obviously there by the time I took that screenshot.

Considering that rbtc is pretty much a non-stop set of attacks using my name and info along with that of many other contributors to Bitcoin-- I'm having a little trouble squaring the idea that Reddit policy in fact would actually prohibit that-- but be that as it may, the actual letter of Reddit's policy would apparently even prohibit a user from giving up their own personal information. 0_o

There has been some other speculation that it had something to do with Marc Lowe, since in the subsequent thread where BitcoinXio admitted that rbtc moderators had been secretly using the automoderator to hide comments-- a practice I've called out many times-- I mentioned that one of the things they'd used it for was to hide any case where I linked to the litigation against him when he had the nerve to accuse me of being unethical or Reddit.  Now, as far as any can tell, simply saying a name can't run afoul of Reddit's doxing policy (in particular, since I connected it to nothing else there); but after concern was expressed that I was potentially violating it there, I simply removed it in all cases. It had nothing to do with the site wide suspension.

Three days later, the site admins got around to the report, so a post with an email address in it and hit the big red switch.

In any case, I responded promptly to reddit's admins, explained the history and my desire to not violate any rules there (even if they're silly).   If they don't want to have me posting there, thats a loss for their users-- and ultimately them.  The problem will still remain that rbtc will continue to encourage and promote untrue attack posts like the one I was responding to above-- and without the ability to counter untruthful speech with more speech, I'm not sure of what will happen there. Cheers.

Possible, but not secure. As you noticed, a minimum spanning tree produces graph that is full of points of failure-- almost any dishonest node would cause significant breakage.

For transaction relay I believe I have previously described a class of gossip protocols that should be within a small constant factor of asymptotically optimal without reducing the reliability much below the current setup.

For block relay where the objective is to minimize latency at basically all costs, the state of the art technique uses network coding to achieve latency close to the physical limits-- in the Fibre protocol the source(s) of a block do not send the block data directly. Instead they send error correction code data to their peers who also share this error correction data to their peers.  If the block has size M a node need only receive any M of it it before they can recover the whole block. The process is largely insensitive to link or node outages or delays, and very little redundant data is received. (The actual process is somewhat more complex because it also utilizes the nodes mempools which end up providing most of the block data without every having to transmit it at all.).

(The promiscuous cross forwarding and potential multi-source combining of Fibre depends on all the participants in a single fibre network trusting each other... or otherwise they can trash the recovery.-- this isn't much of problem because fibre is really only needed to get blocks around the world and there can be multiple separate fibre networks)