As of 12:03pm eastern time blockchain.info is reporting 11.6MB unconfirmed transactions and 1.95BTC in fees (mostly from minimum fees).

Is there another stress test going on? Or did a bunch of guys decide to flood the network to push for larger blocks...

I think this demonstrates his level of hypocrisy here.

Peter is saying to the /r/buttcoin group that he is happy to implement a massive flood attack against Bitcoin for $5K in transactions (which is enough to generate 10s of millions of transactions very quickly), because he is confident that the network can handle this.

Which leads one to ask, if nodes the and current P2P network can handle a flood of several 10s of millions of transactions (as Peter is saying), why can't Bitcoin handle larger blocksizes again?

This is about right

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3bka9i/upetertodd_is_trying_to_get_full_replacebyfee/csmxi6i

Just dig up the daily gold and spx charts for the past 15 years, it shows this pattern. For the record I don't think gold broke before the market because gold investors are more savvy than the broader market, but instead that the gold market breaks first during a liquidity crisis when money itself becomes scarce (the week after this gold spike down, Lehman ran out of cash because there was a massive ongoing liquidity crisis, which then caused the broader market to break).

Gold slowly ramped from the ~$270 low in 2001 to just touching $1000 in March 2008, after which it began to break down and spiked down to around $730 on Sept 11 2008 just before the stock market crashed. This was a >25% fall putting gold solidly into bear market status.

The stock market began to break down the week after gold touch $730s, during which time risk spiked and gold quickly rose to back to the $860 range, only to fall again in Oct after the initial stock market crash as everything in the world crashed in price. That is very high volatility for gold. I remember at the time it distinctly felt that gold broke just before the market, and then recovered as the go to safe asset as the larger stock market crashed.

Right before the '08 crisis started gold dropped a bit even though risk/volatility were rising. The reason is simple, in a debt based money system during a liquidity crisis the market becomes constrained for the cash needed to pay off debt owed. The result is the market needs to sell what it can in order to raise cash to pay off debt. This causes everything to drop (including gold) against cash as entities sell assets to raise funds.

In other words based on '08 behavior, gold unexpectedly dropping during a period of higher levels of risk (which shouldn't happen) is an indication of a coming liquidity crisis.

The problem this time is the CBs already have rates at zero and Ctrl+P turned on. They are painted in a corner this time with only fiat destruction as the way out. I have a little of GLD left in my gold portion, this as reminded me to sell that and get physical now.

Just wait until the next Bitcoin pop, which could happen at any time over the next year given the coming sovereign debt crisis. TPS went up by at least 10x during the previous price bubbles. TPS will be severely and artificially constrained this time, which will both significantly degrade the user experience and this in turn will stop the bubble ramp dead in it's tracks. Losing money because of a core dev pissing match will piss off many. And then after all this happens we ramp to 8MB blocks with no issues, people will be doubly pissed the increase didn't happen in a timely manner. Core devs are going to lose the communities' faith.

Edit: There is a 2.6MB backlog currently, offering 1.1BTC in fees (mostly the minimum fee). This shows minimum fees, if allowed to scale with larger blocks, will adequately fund the mining mechanism.

This is more of a fork than the blocksize increase, it is a fundamental change to the underlying protocol

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3b7260/checklocktimeverify_has_been_merged_finally/

Where is the analysis that proves this change is OK? I've been told that is the hurdle. Are users asking for this? Do users have options to reject it? Why is it OK that a small group of people get to fork Bitcoin.

This change forks Bitcoin into a BlockstreamCoin, and everyone is expected to just accept it because the "Board of Directors" have said to.

What is so boring about this is how none of you one the 1MB side ever say anything factual and instead constantly misrepresent the facts (i.e. lie).

Gavin's proposed change is not $4.5k * 8, instead it is $4.5k * 8 * 2*2*2*2*2*2*2*2*2*2 = $36.8M in fees. And that is for one block, it works out to $1B per day in fees. What this means is if bitcoin scales to the point that it regularly fills 8GB blocks, then there is a $1B/day in fees to pay for the network.


And as others have constantly noted, but you have ignored, is decentralization comes from miners. The P2P network does not represent the level of decentralization, independent miners do. Today we have tens of thousand of independent miners. If fees pay $1B/day we will have even more.

The way to generate resiliency for Bitcoin is to get to the point that each block generates $10M in fees.

Today each block generates around $4,500 in fees on average.

That is not resilient, that is weak and easy for any state to attack.

This idea that using fee pressure on a low # of transactions is a way to get to high value blocks from fees is absurd. The way to get to high value blocks is tons of transactions paying minimum fees.

He really is a fool isn't he.

The only thing of substance that you said there is


1) Censoring attacks do not work unless you have 100% of the miners. It only takes a single pool/miner not colluding the break the censor and include the transactions.
2) Yes it is easy to verify and communicate censor attacks (if they even are pulled off) by an honest node. That node would have the valid transactions, with fees, that are never added to blocks. It doesn't take long to start to ask why there is a pool of transactions not confirming or are only in blocks that are being orphaned from the MC.

Again, you simply do not understand anything about Bitcoin or the dynamics of how it works. These are 101 concepts you can't seem to grasp. Your only replies are attacks without saying anything of substance (and the little you do say is easy to show as wrong) or constant changes to your position on what matters.

So from your response it seems you acknowledge that yes my statement that it only takes a single honest full node to identify and communicate any corruption in the system to the world, is in fact correct and you were grossly incorrect in that long winded nonsense post of yours.

So you then fall back and say "but no one will care and thus you're wrong". First that is a different argument, second that position itself is absurd for numerous and obvious reasons.

God you really are a fucking child aren't you. Back to ignore.

BTW in the example I laid out Coinbase, Circle, Paypal, etc are not full node operators but light client users, they will want to work with honest systems because their users will expect them to work with honest system.

Lots of words that only demonstrate you do no understand what you are pontificating about.

Let me try to spell this out in very simple terms for you. Let's say in the future we had 100 full nodes, 10 pools and everyone else used SPV like wallets, and then 99 full nodes together with 9 pools decided to collude in order to cheat and allocate to themselves coins beyond the 21M limit.

In this scenario the corrupt chain would be the longest and yes what is worse is the P2P network would follow the corrupt chain since they are colluding together. Even worse is all bitcoin end-users would not be able to tell this since they only use SPV like wallets.

However as long as there remains one honest full node (let's say an MIT independently funded node, or a libertarian party funded node), that single honest full node would be able to easily generate concrete evidence of the corrupt transactions and easily present that evidence to the world for everyone to verify for themselves. Since this honest node monitors the network in real time, it could easily flag corruption in real time.

This in turn would expose the fraud and cause the majority of the 100K miners to switch over to an honest pools to rebuild on the valid chain. The pool could even be super honest about it and also include valid transactions from the corrupt chain to protect people not involved.

So yes, it only takes 1 single honest full node to expose to the whole world (including both users and miners) any corruption in the system.

This is the advantage of having every node capable of fully validating every aspect of the blockchain, and why that aspect allows the P2P network to centralize while still providing a robust system.

Gold in modern societies proves justusranvier's point. The total value of all monetary gold is massively undervalued to the total value of monetary instruments.  The reason is because gold is not used as money by 99.9% of the population and so gold is not valued as money by 99.% percent of the population. The gold bug's dream from 1933 of the rest of the population finally waking up and re-valuing their gold to it's proper level has never happened because of this.

It takes a version of Bitcoin that scales to the point that every person on the planet can interact with it directly, to achieve the status that gold once held. To get there requires that bitcoin scales, while maintaining it's decentralized and thus independent nature.

One option to get there is to let the blockchain scale to accommodate everyone, this could look like the following and still be OK. This was Satoshi's vision according to my interpretation of his comments. This option is secure because the miners are highly distributed, decentralized and independent. They are what provide security. In many ways this is how Bitcoin looks today, except for the smaller blocksize.
- ~10GB sized blocks every 10 minutes
- ~100 P2P nodes that are independently sponsored and paid for to perform validation (these would be several large institutions such as MIT, remember it only takes 1 node to flag cheating)
- ~10 pools that receive fees from billions of transactions and are located in several regions (or preferably behind tor or something similar)
- ~100,000 small independent miners connected by stratum to pools, the true location of each miner is easily hidden. These miners live off of the massive number of fees generated

Another option to get there is to take transactions off-chain. This is the SC / lighting network path. The problem with this option is the bitcoin main chain is starved for fees, and so the mining security mechanism is too small to effectively secure the network. This thought process that small blocks will cause fee pressure and that will support a large mining community is just wrong. What will happen is bitcoin will not be used to the extent that it needs to be used to be secure.

A bitcoin with 10s of billions of transactions a day each generating 1 penny in minimum transaction fee, will be much more secure than a bitcoin with a small number of transactions and slight fee pressure (at best) and where most fees are captured by SCs.

Well said, and I think a lot of people see it this way.

There are lots of people who understand Bitcoin well enough and back a blocksize increase. Them being simply told they are unqualified to have a view/voice and to trust the "experts" without any sensible counter arguments, has turned them off as well it should.

And lots of people will remember this when it comes time to propose the SC fork.

That is completely not the situation at all.

Gavin was clear that the intent was to let the bitcoin community decide, by enabling the community to have options they themselves could pick from (bitcoind, bitcoin XT). The reality of the current situation is the core devs have probably put in less than 1% of the coding infrastructure work to get the bitcoin ecosystem to where it is today, but simultaneously get to dictate almost all the terms. That makes no sense for an open platform.


Gavin simply enables choice, he has no power to force anything with that move. In fact the default no action is for people to stay with the blockstream team. People have to make a concious choice to switch to XT, while the "no vote" segment essentially votes no. The path Gavin offered with XT was in fact probably the hardest to make work simply because of that fact.

I've come to see a single core as being the single greatest threat to Bitcoin out of all of this. A better situation to me would be a bitcoin P2P network with several separately developed cores that adhere to a common set of rules. The upgrade path is then always put to a vote. Any one core could then propose a change simply by implementing it (with a rule that after x% of blocks back the change it becomes active).

Then if people like the change, more will move to that core. This in turn would cause the other core to adopt the change or lose their users, and that is how consensus is achieved. If a majority did not like the change, they would not move to that core, and the change would never be accepted.

At no point in this do any set of gatekeepers get to dictate terms. Since no core has a majority of users captured, change would always have to come through user acceptance and adoption, and developers would simply be proposers of options.

200M years of continuously decreasing levels. We have barely reversed a mere fraction of that. Yes it is a change, but that does not mean it is a bad change.

http://theresilientearth.com/files/images/carbon_over_time.jpg

BTW, there was a mass extinction event around that 300M year bottom in CO2 levels. One of the proposed causes was that the prior explosion in plant life just prior to that dropped CO2 levels so far that it cooled the earth to a level that started the extinction event. Another explanation is that the bottoming in CO2 levels 300M years ago approached the minimum required for photosynthesis to function, which crashed plant life and animals higher up the food chain.

If that turns out to be the reason, then humans just saved the planet.

This.

You never sell your Bitcoins. You simply slightly rebalance from time to time on the way to the moon. This enables you to keep a sizable BTC holding while buying houses on the way to the moon.

Greece won't adopt Bitcoin as a currency. That is not how sound money mechanisms work.

Now the Greek people themselves might choose to ignore government fiat and adopt Bitcoin. But that is very different from Greece adopting bitcoin.