it's called Metcalfe's Law. "value" of the network is squared by every new user. iCE would rather keep it strangled down to him and his Myrcea buddies.
Not every new user needs direct access to the Mother Blockchain: The true value that Bitcoin brings to the table is not "everyone gets to write into the holy ledger", it is instead "everyone gets to benefit from sane and non-inflationary financial instutions whose sanity and honesty are ensured by the holy blockchain".
-davout "Strangled?" Typical of you to invoke a violent metaphor, which entails me ruthlessly killing poor baby bitcoin asleep in its little crib. How scary! Quelle horrour!  I keep explaining your politics of fear have no power here, yet you persist in framing the 1mb limit as a death sentence despite having spent the last 4 years hyping Bitcoin's antifragility. My "Myrcia buddies" include all the core devs, minus Gavin (who barely contributes code these days). Gavin has successfully created rough consensus among them w/r/t 20mb blocks. But it's not the consensus he wanted, so now he's staging a coup. Gavin is mad with power and has gone completely Even Duffield. He wants to infect BTC with supernodes! You are both welcome to bugger off to the altcoin ghetto with Gavin's bloated XT fork, but please leave the rest of us (who want to keep Bitcoin diffuse/diverse/defensible/resilient) out of it. Perhaps it would be better for the pointy-haired boss to listen to the coders and engineers responsible for fixing Bitcoin when the GigaBlocks break it? The network isn't "choking" under this stress test. "Choking" means no air can enter the lungs, and the choking victim dies. Nothing analogous is happening here; tx are still being confirmed as usual but with some delay depending on the fee paid. If nothing was being confirmed, that would be "choking." All that happened is free tx take longer. "Strangle?" "Choking?" WTF is it with you stealing metaphors which portray the non-Gavin core devs as murdering their own baby? Nobody "strangling" or "choking" Bitcoin. If and when Bitcoin chokes or is strangled, please rest assured it will emerge from the conflict more resilient than before. Why can't you take Szabo's advice to calm down and stop exaggerating? Get a grip Doc. Your "zomg Bitcoin is literally going to dieeeeee" panic attacks are becoming unseemly. c'mon iCE. i'm just elevating my rhetoric to meet yours.  if you doubt that, simply go back and look at your posts on entry to this topic. if you don't want to receive it, don't dish it out. |
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lol, the network is STILL choked off after all this time. i don't blame the short sightedness of the guy who just sold us off down to $232 given how strident iCE and his buddies have been about making any progress whatsoever on this block size issue. i think it's a big mistake as it just gives the rest of us cheaper coins to accumulate as i think a block size increase is inevitable and soon as a result of the stress test:  Is this a TX spam attack? essentially yes. a handful of Reddit dudes decided to stress test the network by sending thousands of smallish tx's with fees across the network. predictably, everyone's full/mining node mempools clogged up with unconfirmed tx's. at the max yesterday, my full nodes even 1.5-2 hours after the stress test completed were clogged up with 24000 unconf tx's which usually are at around 3000-4000 iirc. the max hit was 26000 during the test. what you're seeing in the chart is the default settings for block size for miners left at 750MB meaning full blocks are happening right now as we speak. |
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the problem with core devs deciding any block size limit is that they essentially become central bankers, ie, unilaterally determining everyone's cost of accessing the network. by what metric can they ever determine what size is appropriate given most of Bitcoin's incentives are economically and game theoretically driven? better to let the free mkt of miners and users work that out via mutually determined fees.
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hey Mom, look! creative destruction at work!:   |
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lol, the network is STILL choked off after all this time. i don't blame the short sightedness of the guy who just sold us off down to $232 given how strident iCE and his buddies have been about making any progress whatsoever on this block size issue. i think it's a big mistake as it just gives the rest of us cheaper coins to accumulate as i think a block size increase is inevitable and soon as a result of the stress test: |
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 Good. /grumpy cat This stunt may generate the type of incalculable empirical feedback we need to ascertain how best to modify the max_block_size parameter. Of course since it is artificial demand in the form of a stress-test that factor must be accounted for. But in the aggregate, we see here the ecosystem demanding/supplying a required service, so it's not completely bogus data. It is critical for Bitcoin to grow up, not out. Bitcoin's Mother of Blockchains needs skycraper transactions, not sprawl. Bitcoin and its Blockchain must develop like a culture, not merely grow like cancer. Full block pressure catalyzes development of optimal strategies for using the limited space; subsidizing artificially sparse blocks retards that process. It's not possible to build a currency on misanthropy.
Au contraire, misanthropy is the only rational basis on which to build a currency. That is why Bitcoins trustless Satoshi-Consensus mechanism disrupted and made obsolete all manner of weighted-trust-node-network Rube Goldberg schemes. Bitcoin is the only currency still works like gold and silver when about half of humanity is an adversary. btw, this stress test is also an example of how anyone (not just large miners} actively supporting a >1MB network like XT will circle back around and flood Core with small TX's in hopes of breaking what is perceived to be a competitor. hell, i might even do that. it's so easy. |
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Bitcoin is the only currency still works like gold and silver when about half of humanity is an adversary.
it won't work like gold when only 0.0000001% of the world's population think like us or have any exposure to Bitcoin due to the strangulation by 1MB blocks. This point is crucial, as others also have said. Bitcoin can compete now, with this low penetration, and for every new user the liquidity increases. That is in my view, a guarantee of success. Compare this to just about any investment project that have a threshold of sales to be a success. Some succeed, but most don't. it's called Metcalfe's Law. "value" of the network is squared by every new user. iCE would rather keep it strangled down to him and his Myrcea buddies. |
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Good. /grumpy cat This stunt may generate the type of incalculable empirical feedback we need to ascertain how best to modify the max_block_size parameter. Of course since it is artificial demand in the form of a stress-test that factor must be accounted for. But in the aggregate, we see here the ecosystem demanding/supplying a required service, so it's not completely bogus data. It is critical for Bitcoin to grow up, not out. Bitcoin's Mother of Blockchains needs skycraper transactions, not sprawl. Bitcoin and its Blockchain must develop like a culture, not merely grow like cancer. Full block pressure catalyzes development of optimal strategies for using the limited space; subsidizing artificially sparse blocks retards that process. now you're just being obstinate in the face of irrefutable data. something needs to be done now as it appears any random Reddit dude can plug everything up if he wants to causing everyone's fees to rise while stalling out confirmations. so in case you have an immediately deployable solution to your organic, resilient, vertical growth ideals, you should be on board with at least a temporary fix to give the devs some time to actually build one. |
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You can never win with the masses. They will always be wrong, for as long as they demand to organize themselves in collectives. The Internet is essentially the mass of masses. Extrapolate the audience averaging effect in the popular game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire: "But there’s a third option: You can use your “Ask-the-Audience" life line. You can poll the entire studio audience on the four possible answers, and their responses are instantaneously assembled into a bar graph. Invariably, this graph shows one overwhelming choice, and with rare exceptions the audience is right. “I’ll trust the audience,” you tell Regis. “Final answer.” Good move. But why? No person in the audience is any more likely than you to know where grapes come from, yet the collective intelligence of the group is almost always a better bet than your best guess. Psychologists are very interested in this perplexing statistical phenomenon. If the crowd is always wiser than any individual, what does that say about the way knowledge is stored and arranged in our minds? And can it help us make better choices, even beyond game shows? ... That’s actually what Vul and Pashler found when they ran the experiment. As reported in the July issue of the journal Psychological Science, the average of two guesses for any individual participant was better than either guess alone, regardless of the time between guesses. So polling the “crowd within” does indeed yield a statistically more accurate answer. What’s more, this internal crowd gets more independent-minded with time: Contestants who were asked to second-guess themselves three weeks later benefited even more by averaging their two guesses than did those who second-guessed themselves immediately. The psychologists speculate that the cognitive pull of the original answer loses its power and allows more mental flexibility over time." http://www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman/2008/06/polling-crowd-within.cfmThis reminded me of Intrade. What a loss. |
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Cypherdoc please answer me. I really want to understand your reasoning. It is important and impacts my decision process.
Justus et al, please also chime in. I want to understand the model you all have in mind of how Bitcoin changes the world.
for a bunch of towel-head Muslims to rise up in revolution Don't appreciate the racial stereotyping. Uncharacteristic for a forward thinker such as yourself. It was written with the same dripping disdain that I'm arguing against to make a point. Probably not a good idea. |
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Cypherdoc please answer me. I really want to understand your reasoning. It is important and impacts my decision process.
Justus et al, please also chime in. I want to understand the model you all have in mind of how Bitcoin changes the world.
i think you underestimate the common man and their ability to discern what the hell is going on in today's world. i've sprinkled hints throughout posts but we generally ignore each other so i don't blame you for missing it. understanding hard money is not hard. i think most ppl innately understand that repeatedly printing up a bunch of money to solve a debt problem isn't a solution. borrowing more money is not a solution for a borrowing problem. there is also plenty of evidence TPTB are losing their grip. i see evidence of this everywhere. the internet combined with smartphones is contributing to this more widespread awareness and education of what's going on in the world. it used to be taboo reading your smartphone out in public. now it's acceptable and you're even considered unimportant if you don't check it every once in a while. the enhanced connectivity of ppl round the world allows for the free exchange of ideas and information never seen before. we can now educate each other. this is exactly what we're doing here in this thread. for a bunch of towel-head Muslims to rise up in revolution around Facebook & Twitter communiques in Egypt and Libya back in the Arab Spring is one of a number of signs that the masses aren't going to put up with TPTB bullshit anymore. corruption and fraud need to hide in the dark. it hates transparency. the internet is shining a bright light upon TPTB. they don't like it and the more they complain (like Mitch McConnell, James Comey of FBI, Clapper of NSA, Cameron of UK) the more i know we're on the right path to disruption. central bank reputations have taken a beating the last 6 yrs. anyone who follows the financial mkts, like i do, can see evidence of their manipulation everywhere. everyone knows it's ludicrous to see stocks gyrate wildly immediately after an FOMC announcement. sidhujag keeps talking about staying long the stock mkt "until the masses" come in. as if they are going to be sheep once again. well, i don't think that's happening this time. and if i'm right about stocks rolling over right now as per my charts, guys like him who've always assumed the idiot on the street (avg Joe investor) is going to buy from them at 32000 are going to be in for a painful realization that the game has now leveled out due to less information asymmetry. 60% of American in fact do not own stocks (which is way down) and it doesn't look like they're going to anytime soon as they've learned from 2 major crashes of >50% in the last 15 yrs along with a real estate crash. this is also why 80% of Americans voted against TARP despite the propaganda. come June 1 we'll find out if the NSA will retain their mass data collection program. it will be a sad day if they prevail but there's alot of lobbying going on right now and i'm hopeful it will not be extended. either way, guys like Glenn Greenwald, Eric Snowden, and many others continue to fight back. they are hard to ignore and fundamentally the NSA and TPTB will find it harder and harder to defend their policies out in public. they don't realize how stupid they sound and most ppl realize this. and simply from a numerical standpoint, i don't see how TPTB can control all of us especially if i'm right about the increased generalized awareness of the public. i often fly and like to look down across the landscape at all the millions of homes and dwellings scattered around. i imagine all of these dwellings being connected by the internet and ppl talking, texting, emailing freely their opinions and concerns. i don't think there is anyway a small # of elites with their police can stop everyone. it's impossible. this is why torrenting, file sharing and streaming continue to go on unchecked despite persistent and expensive music and Hollywood campaigns to snuff this out. the disruption of Wherehouse, Barnes & Noble, Borders, Encyclopedia Brittanica is evidence of this. the rise and increasing popularity of Linux, Android, and open source in general is good. Bitcoin is a major part of this revolution and b/c it is open source and adheres to the principles of sound money, i don't see any way a Digital Kill Switch can keep it away from the general population. it is too important to us to allow that. i simply see guys like Larry Summers adhering to his own principle of greed in saving/protecting his built up fortune by coming to Bitcoin b/c he sees the writing on the wall; not as some allegiance to his fellow elites as you claim. they are all greedy bastards and they realize that the zero bound on interest rates is the end of the line. negative interest rates are sure to spark a revolution. the smart ones are abandoning ship. they've had their run, they know it, and the smart thing is to pivot in the other direction before their brethren jump ship. that's alot of rambling. i'm tired and i don't usually like to compose this much shit. most of what i have to say is in my earlier posts in 2011. |
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Direct use of BTC by >0.0000001% of the world's population isn't necessary nor supportable.
0.0000001% of the world's population is only 7 people, you know Not 700? Edit: oops. I even took the time to think about the numbers yet stillput on the percentag sign .  |
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Direct use of BTC by >0.0000001% of the world's population isn't necessary nor supportable.
0.0000001% of the world's population is only 7 people, you know Not 700? Edit: oops. I even took the time to think about the numbers yet stillput on the percentag sign . |
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Bitcoin is the only currency still works like gold and silver when about half of humanity is an adversary.
it won't work like gold when only 0.0000001% of the world's population think like us or have any exposure to Bitcoin due to the strangulation by 1MB blocks. |
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There you go again. Using fear (this time, of being "left behind" from the glorious rapture of GavinCoin) to sell a hard fork. The rough consensus of all non-Gavin core devs is against 20mb blocks in the near future. But for some reason, Gavin will only accept a consensus which aligns with his position. Who does he think he is, Linux Torvalds or Evan Duffield? So how does Gavin the pointy-headed boss react to being unable to convince his coders and engineers? By lobbying (*cough, panicking, cough*) the drooling masses in an attempt to overrule the experts with a stampeding mob. That's not the path of "calm down already" suggested by Nick Szabo. The Gavin tail is trying to wag the core dev dog, which guarantees the predictable "rancor" he's whining about. Ironically, when the wheels fall off of GavinCoin because of UXTO assplosions or whatever, these spurned core devs will be the ones Gavin and everyone else will turn to for solutions. Typical "Oops I broke it, now you fix it" pointy-headed boss behavior!  If persistent full 1mb blocks turn out to be an insurmountable problem, consensus to modify that limit would not need to be manufactured with lobbying and tales of impending dooom. take a look at how a rag tag army of volunteers can clog up the network. we're still stuck at over 23000 unconf tx's, with a peak around 25000, now about 2 hrs later: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/37rwph/stress_test_for_the_next_few_hours_ill_be/ |
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is there a way to initialize a Trezor seed w/o revealing the master pubkey to mytrezor.com? is that what python trezor is for? can it be done through Mycelium?
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i saw this in the Bitcoin wiki for deterministic wallets:
"Armory deterministic wallet
Armory has its own Type-2 deterministic wallet format based on a "root key" and a "chain code." Earlier versions of Armory required backing up both the "root key" and "chaincode," while newer versions start deriving the chaincode from the private key in a non-reversible way. These newer Armory wallets (0.89+) only require the single, 256-bit root key. This older format is intended to be phased out in favor of the standard BIP0032 format. "
is this going to be a problem for those who keep and maintain old style wallets with both the chain code and root key?
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there's a real danger here that if the other 1MB core devs don't get off their asses and help out Gavin & Mike, their roles as core devs could be relegated to the dustbin of history. this is a great chance for those talented devs who have felt rejected or humiliated from the likes of current core devs to get their foot in the door. we clearly know they exist and in great #'s. core dev is a highly coveted position leading to all sorts of great opportunities as the Blockstream core dev's refusal to step down in the name of conflict of interest very well demonstrates. from Mike Hearns on Reddit: [–]mike_hearn 70 points 7 hours ago Short of some last minute change of heart by Wladimir and the other committers, it looks like Bitcoin XT may soon become more important. I am looking for someone to help develop a website and logo for it. If you're interested please hop onto the mailing list and let me know: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/bitcoin-xt Or you can just email me: hearn@vinumeris.comIf things go ahead and running XT becomes the way to express an opt-in to larger blocks, I will also be looking for volunteers to help co-build the binaries with gitian. Finally I am looking for anyone who has experience with managing patchsets in git. My current workflow of one-branch-per-feature plus one-branch-per-release is fiddly and fragile. I plan to reorganise things at some point. Suggestions for better approaches are welcome. permalinksavecontextfull comments (499)reportgive gold |
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...
The UXTO constraint may never be solved in an acceptable (sub)linear way, or the solution(s) could for political reasons never be implemented in BTC.
...
Almost certainly 'never' by any realistic definition of various things. ... Solving 'the UTXO problem' would require what is by most definitions 'magic'. Perhaps some future quantum-effect storage, communications, and processing schemes could 'solve' the problem but I'm not expecting to pick up such technology at Fry's by the next holiday season (Moore's law notwithstanding.) A comment from chriswilmer got me thinking… The UTXO set is actually bounded. The total amount of satoshis that will ever exists is (21x10^6) x (10^8) = 2.1 x 10^15 = 2.1 "peta-sats" ... ... OK, now let's be reasonable! Let's assume that 10 billion people on earth each control about 4 unspent outputs on average. That's a total of 40 billion outputs, or (40 x 10^9) x (65 bytes) = 2.6 terabytes With these assumptions, it now only takes about 20 of those SD cards to store the UTXO set: (2.6 x 10^12) / (128 x 10^9) = 20.3, or, three 1-terrabyte SSDs, for a total cost of about $1,500. ... I have thought about this bounding (mostly in the context of the current rather awkward/deceptive 'unspendable dust' settings.) I think that there is currently, and probably for quite some time, some big problems with this rosy picture: - UTXO is changing in real time through it's entire population. This necessitates currently (as I understand things) a rather more sophisticated data-structure than something mineable like the blockchain. UTXO is in ram and under the thing that replaced BDB (forgot the name of that database at the moment) because seeks, inserts, and deletes are bus intensive and, again, in constant flux. Agreed. The UTXO can be thought of as "hot" storage that's continually being updated, while the blockchain can be thought of as "cold" storage that does not have the same requirements for random memory reads and writes. However, the UTXO doesn't need to sit entirely in RAM (e.g., the uncompressed UTXO set is, AFAIK, around 2 GB, but bitcoind runs without problem on machines with less RAM). ...but would be interested to see a proof-of-concept, simulator, prototype, etc.
Agreed. What I'm curious about is the extent to which the UTXO database could be optimized algorithmically and with custom hardware. Consider the above scenario where 10 billion people control on average 4 unspent outputs (40 billion coins), giving us a UTXO set approximately 2.6 TB in size. Now, let's assume that we sort these coins perfectly and write them to a database. Since they're sorted, we can find any coin using binary search in no more than 36 read operations (about 65 bytes each): log 2(40x10^9) = 36 Rough numbers: A typical NAND FLASH chip permits random access reads within about 30 us, a typical NOR FLASH chip within about 200 ns, and perhaps less than 20 ns for SDRAM, so it takes about 36 x 30 us = 900 us (NAND FLASH) 36 x 200 ns = 7.2 us (NOR FLASH) 36 x 20 ns = 0.72 us (SDRAM) to find a particular coin if there's 40 billion of them. If we commit 10% or our time to looking up coins, to match Visa's average rate of 2,000 TPS means we need to be able to find a particular coin in (1 sec x 10%) / (2000 /sec) = 50 us. My gut tells me that looking up coins isn't too daunting a problem, even if 10 billion people each control 4 coins, and, in aggregate, make 2,000 transactions per seconds. ...Of course, the UTXO is constantly evolving. As coins get spent, we have to mark them as spent and then eventually erase them from the database, and add the new coins to that database that were created. If we assume the typical TX creates 2 new coins, then this means we need to write about (65 bytes per coin) x (2 coins per TX) x (2000 TXs per sec) = 0.26 MB/sec Again, this isn't fast. Even an SD card like the SanDisk Extreme Pro has a write speed up to 95 MB/s. Of course, this is the speed for sequential writes, and we'll need to do plenty of (slower) random writes and erase operations, but note that 0.26 MB means that only 0.26 MB / 2.6 TB = 0.00001 % of our database is modified each second, or about 1% per day. My questions, then, are: - To what extent can we develop algorithms to optimize the UTXO database problem? - What is the best hardware design for such a database? Mike Hearns on reddit: If the block creates the outputs that it does itself spend all those outputs will be in RAM cache. So they will be effectively free to check. LevelDB is very fast, even on a spinning hard disk. You can't assume 1 UTXO = 1 seek. https://github.com/google/leveldbreadrandom : 16.677 micros/op; (approximately 60,000 reads per second) 60,000 reads per second, for random access. This isn't a problem. Gavin is being highly conservative and I think panicked a little - LevelDB effectively sorts keys by hotness (due to the leveled SSTable structure). So old/dormant coins will eventually fall to the bottom of the pile and be a bit slower to access, with the benefit that recent coins are near the top and are cheaper to access. People who try and create then spend coins over and over again to waste IOPs are going to be very frustrated by their lack of success. And now I'm off to the airport for a two week holiday. Have fun guys!  |
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Blockstream hired Rusty Russell to work on a lightning network implementation. This is going to be big. Now it appears that the development efforts for sidechains and lightning networks are coming together. Russel, who joined Blockstream a few weeks ago, is working on lightning networks, and one of his first actions was to set up a Blockstream-hosted mailing list for “Discussion of the development of the Lightning Network, a caching layer for bitcoin.” The new mailing list archives are freely accessible.
“They hired me,” Russel said on Reddit. “We agreed I’d be working on developing lightning. I set up a mailing list and am developing a toy prototype to explore the ideas. Will put on github once that’s ready (two weeks?) but it’s a long long way from anything someone could use. I’m excited about lightning, but it’s a marathon, not a sprint.” Explain to me why requiring centralized lightning nodes to be up 24/7 is a good thing? |
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