The concept probably won't have any suitable metrics to be used as a gauge so I don't think there is any absolute answer to this.

With the growth of Bitcoin, you're going to inevitably eliminate the smaller scale miners who can't afford to keep their costs down. It would result in having miners probably being centralized around certain regions and farms. Mining would probably never be any more decentralized.

As for the full node count, I suspect that some nodes actively block Bitnodes crawlers as they publicly list their IPs and thus resulting in a much lower node count. Running a full node is obviously not so viable for most people; even in 2021 360GB+ is fairly significant if you consider that some laptops and/or desktops only ship with 1TB of storage. That, combined with the very few advantages over SPV (which I assume most actually wouldn't consider), will probably reduce the full node count over time. I can't see the point of most people running Bitcoin Core when using Electrum or Wasabi would suffice for their use case while wasting no time to synchronize whenever they're using it.

You can. Miners are ultimately the ones that determines the transactions that are included in their blocks.

By default, the reference client with those which recognizes opt-in RBF flags will not relay replacement transaction if the transaction that it is supposed to replace does not have a opt-in RBF flag. As such, having no RBF flag would only result in the replacement transaction having a poor propagation provided that those nodes have knowledge of the first transaction. Replacing a transaction without a RBF flag will not make that transaction invalid, just that the poor propagation will result in miners potentially having no knowledge of it.

Most services actually prohibit CoinJoin transactions as they're pretty easy to detect, whether it's tainted or not. As said before, unless you're able to pay some Bitcoins to a miner for newly mined coins, there probably isn't a way around it to get 100% untainted coins.

Bitcoin is fungible. Taint is just a metric invented by governments or companies to try to seize your funds under the guise that it is used for illicit activities. Having a tainted coin should not diminish the value in any way. Most exchange and services only restrict accounts if they see evidences of the coins being sent directly through a casino or any other services that is prohibited within their jurisdiction.

Since there is no metrics to determine whether a coin is tainted, there really isn't a surefire way to determine a level of taint that is universally recognized. Every coin is tainted at some point in their history as it gets mixed around, unless it is a newly generated one which really means there is no point in trying to find one that isn't.

Those are addresses. You cannot create a multisig redeem script from addresses as they are the hash of the public keys.

If you have the ECDSA public keys of the addresses, you can create a multisig address and it's corresponding redeem script but you won't be able to import it. You can use createmultisig function from the console as below:

That alone would defeat the purpose of Bitcoin won't it? Making all of the computers ping certain centralized server is not good. There is really no such thing as "computer security", there are tons of zero day exploits which could be used by any adversary before it gets patched.

From what I can tell, you're basically describing something like a centralized banking system but instead of bank officials, miners are the ones that regulate this. It would be good if you could read up more about Bitcoin first and its derivative protocols. I think Lightning network would interest you with this particular aspect that you're talking about.

How are you going to build and lengthen the blockchain without any miners?

If you are talking about switching to POS, it (probably) won't happen. The difficulty helps to balance it out, as the profit margin decreases, mining would be left to those with cheap electricity (probably hydro or other renewable sources) and efficient hardware. Not like electrical usage is really as much of a concern as the media makes it out to be.

The USB?

Using a QR code might be better for this, it's like a one-way communication and would give a true airgap setup. I think there is some limits to the size of the transaction, but that shouldn't be of a concern. If it gets too large, then you can just use multiple QR codes to stitch it together or use a different encoding. Electrum uses base43.

It's a blanket statement to dismiss it as untrue. Bitcoin does have its merits as a decentralized network but there's obviously a lot of work to be done. A 51% attack is not the focus of the project but to explore the other possible vulnerabilities regarding the protocol itself. Mining will never decentralized, at its current stage. Barring the Chinese government banning Bitcoin mining completely, it is impossible for them to not hold a majority of it; most ASIC manufacturers are based in China and the cost of mining is probably much lower there as well.

Obviously 51% attack is not economically viable if you were to just own the hardware and operate the ASICs yourself. The article doesn't dispute that but rather it was calling for a monitor *in the event* that it happens, which is completely rational. Bitcoin being open source doesn't mean that it won't have any vulnerabilities which I presume is what this is set up for. I don't think any of the statements mentioned in the article are unfounded, might be getting a bit offtopic with your replies here.

What? Bitcoin functions on the economics of game theory to ensure that 51% attacks are infeasible.

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I can't really see anything bad that could affect Bitcoin. At best, they could contribute actively to Bitcoin development and at worst nothing happens. As for the 51% monitor (or rather double spend/forks), here it is: https://forkmonitor.info/nodes/btc.

As we have explained in the previous thread, miners are not entities that can be regulated on a protocol level. There is no reason why you should partition them into groups; they are solely the ones finding blocks with sufficient PoW and building the blockchain. Schemes like that would overhaul the entire Bitcoin and it would be better for anything like that to be implemented on an altcoin instead, though I don't really understand how that would differ from a traditional bank.

You could try to understand how Bitcoin actually works first before suggesting ideas. It would be far easier and more conducive for discussions that way.

#47 - ranochigo

Thanks!

So for the checkpoints within Electrum, they wouldn't do anything to protect against a sybil attack? My impression is that it makes attacks more costly as the difficulty of a block has to be much higher. If they are able to generate a block, then it could be a better idea to just mine legitimately?

No. I synchronized it on my computer with a fairly powerful processor with 6 GB of dbcache and it took about ~8ish hours. It was a stark comparison than when I was synchronizing it with my HDD which took almost a day under similar conditions.

In contrast, I'm running a node on my Intel Atom C2350 server, which is pretty weak in comparison and it took about 5 days with default settings. I don't think most users would want to run a full node if that is their hardware specifications; it'll just be a pain. A tip that I'd give is to increase the dbcache to push more of the data into the ram so that it can be accessed readily while the client goes through IBD.

Most users don't have to use full nodes if all they want is to send some Bitcoins. Full nodes will be better for users but it is not necessary for most. Obviously a tradeoff would be with the privacy and to a certain extent it's security as well.
Data storage and it's density are getting better throughout the years. I don't think it's necessary for everyone to be downloading a full node just to use Bitcoin. It can be downloaded while you're doing other things with your computers as well.
There has been a series of past changes to Bitcoin Core that has managed to speedup the synchronization exponentially[1]. I don't think I've seen a more recent version of this but there has certainly been much more optimization in the more recent versions.

[1] https://bitcoincore.org/en/2017/03/13/performance-optimizations-1/

That assumes that SPV clients do not consider any pre-defined hardcoded checkpoints within the client which would result in the subsequent blocks still being equally difficult or somewhere in that region to be mined. Isolating someone from the actual network is easy if the attacker and have a MITM attack with the client not implementing any redundancies in the process, ie. SSL connection to the servers in the case of Electrum. SPV clients are intrinsically less secure but attacks won't be as easy as that.

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51% attacks is a guaranteed success but it doesn't mean that the attacker requires 51% of the hashrate to be able to have any chance to reverse TXes with only a few confirmations. See selfish mining.

The way the difficulty works should be the same as well. If it's empty, the merkle root is the TXID of coinbase so there is really no difference in the difficulty whether you are mining empty blocks or not. You could use covert ASICboost and mine empty blocks but that probably wouldn't make sense economically.

I see that you understand that the distribution of the block intervals follows an exponential function and that the probability of a block being 1 second from each other is 0.167%. The problem with this is that there is no perfect information when you're looking at block intervals. Propagation of the transaction across the network takes some time (depending on how well your node is connected). The only metric that is remotely usable is the timestamp that the block is received by the node which is subjected to the delay as above.

It would be a stretch to assume that all of the blocks are mined within 1 second of each other. It's much faster to just take just the hash of the block header on the other pool than waiting for it to be relayed through the network.

Bitcoin Core still has getblocktemplate's RPC functional. It should still be able to be used as a node for solomining.

How much fees did you pay? You should be looking at about 30 to 40 satoshis/byte for it to be confirmed within a reasonable period of time. You can try to right click and see if you're able to bump fee to get a replacement transaction sent with a higher fee.

It's pretty obvious that nothing is absolutely safe and not everyone can get a new computer specifically just for a specific use. Using a LiveCD would be fairly secure in the sense that only persistent rootkits would be able to infect it. It's more of a middle ground for OP.

Chrome is better than Firefox in terms of it's malware protection due to it's design. Anonymity should not be an issue here; OP is asking for security advice, nothing about privacy. If privacy is your concern, you should be looking at a browser that is privacy oriented, ie. Tor, Brave. Firefox is not designed for privacy without any specific modifications.

Privilege escalation attacks are not uncommon in malware and I would certainly always assume the worst case scenario with this.

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Using them for suspicious website alone wouldn't probably infect you with malware if you're using a browser like Chrome. It has a sandbox that should reduce the risk factor.

Anyhow, unless you are able to separate your browsing activities from crypto, I can't see anything that would be foolproof. You can either use a LiveUSB for those or a different computer completely.