Well, no.  He's guilty, duh.  A fair trial would still find him guilty and sentence him to jail time.

What it might do is sentence him fairly (ie, same term as other dope dealers, unless they actually get a conviction on the murder charge) instead of giving him many times the sentence of other equally-guilty dope dealers.

Oh, hey, I could have drugs on the homage site too.  In addition to silks and spices, it could sell aspirin and ibuprofen and nasal decongestants and antacids and ....  See, then we could set up a site that did drug deals too! 

Fuck all existing mining hardware.  If miners can do this then clearly it isn't correct and needs to be thrown out anyway.

It's true.  To determine the place in the last-thousand-blocks rule, you need to download and check the last thousand blocks (not just the last 50).

A different consensus-rule could be used that would be amenable to checking over shorter sequences.  For example, each block could publish a "current block version" as it does now, _and_ a logarithmic average - with the changeover to occur when the logarithmic average gets within 0.05 of the higher integer version.

A logarithmic average at block n would (as an example) be 999/1000 of the logarithmic average at the previous block, plus 1/1000 of the current block version.  Using a logarithmic average rather than a computed-over-the-last-thousand average would mean you could check and make sure the logarithmic average is right without looking more than one block into the past. 

To clarify: All the transactions in the BTCNuggets block, EXCEPT for the coinbase, which was an invalid transaction, were later included and confirmed in the valid chain.  The other blocks in this fork did not contain any valid transactions; only their coinbases, which were invalid.

Okay, I'll try to help.
Yes.  The software doing the block version upgrade to V3 was watching and had counted 950 of the last 1000 blocks having contained headers that said "block version=3".  Once that happened, any further blocks whose header said  "block version = 2" were supposed to be rejected.  

And at precisely that moment, at absolutely the first block where a "version = 2" block ought to have been rejected, BTCNuggets mined a block whose blockchain header said "block version = 2."


Slight edit here:  F2Pool and AntPool were not running correct software.   They had taken correct software and then deliberately modified it to make it wrong.  They stripped out the functionality of actually checking the block they were building on, because time spent checking a block for validity is not time spent mining, and - ASSUMING the block you've received is correct - spending more time mining makes you more money.  So F2Pool took this "version= 2" block from BTCNuggets, failed to check it, and built a "version = 3" block as the next block in the chain.  This version-3 block was not valid because it was built on a block that ought to've been rejected, but they'd never checked.  F2Pool and Antpool then built further on this new invalid block, never actually checking the original block from BTCNuggets.  If they had checked that block, they'd have known that the blocks they were building were invalid because that parent/grandparent/etc block originally built by BTCNuggets was invalid by the v3 rules.

When they did this, they built a chain that every full node checking the block chain and running correct software for block-version-3 would immediately reject no matter how long it got.


Yes.  Miners that had not deliberately introduced this bug into their software, simply ignored the bad chain because its blocks are invalid, and continued to do as they always do - to work to extend the longest valid chain.  Likewise all v3-enabled clients were also ignoring the bad chain and would not regard a transaction as "real" unless it were included in a valid chain.  


Regardless of how far ahead the bad branch had gotten, nobody running correct V3-checking software would ever have been using its blocks as a criterion of whether a transaction were successful, because those were invalid blocks.  The bad fork could still be adding blocks today, and people running up-to-date software would be in absolutely no danger of being fooled.  As far as a full node is concerned, your transaction is not confirmed until it is in a VALID block.  

The only reason people were in danger of thinking a transaction was confirmed when it in fact was not, is because a lot of them are subject to exactly the same bug that F2Pool and AntPool deliberately added to their otherwise-correct code - they are not fully checking blocks for validity.  

In some cases this is because they are running lightweight phone clients or SPV wallets.  Some of those check most of the requirements for validity, but there is one condition that they cannot check without downloading the entire block chain, and that is that in order to be valid a block must be built on a valid parent block.

In other cases this is because they are using web wallets at places like blockchain.io, and have no idea whether or not the people holding their keys are checking the validity of blocks according to the v.3 rules. - in which case it's best to assume that they are not, otherwise  you're going to get "confirmed" transactions which later disappear.


Approximately.  


Six.  Assuming nobody decides to mine another one.


Yes.  They had deliberately introduced a bug into their code to avoid "wasting" time checking the validity of blocks.


Perhaps they knew BIP66 had gone into effect, but they weren't checking validity, so clearly they didn't care.

Pretty sure it doesn't matter; given what they'd done to their mining software it would have done the same thing regardless.

Yes, absolutely.

Nope,  I checked.  There is no off-by-one error in the functionality that they cut out of their client.

Because of not being willing to spend one-tenth of a second checking a block when that tenth of a second could be spent mining.  


ALL OF THEM.  The blocks between the current block and the genesis block.  When you receive one block you need to check one block.  And if you keep doing so, then at any given moment you're going to have complete proof of the validity of EVERY BLOCK from genesis to the current block.  


Clearly not at issue here; in more than one case, the previous block was more than ten seconds old before the next block came out, meaning there is absolutely no way that any attempt to check it was made.  Any such check would have failed WELL before then.

The situation sort of reminds me of what happens when I'm trying to use a genetic algorithm or other heuristic-search algorithm to solve a problem, and it turns out that my reward function stated the problem slightly wrong.

The symptom is that you then get "pseudosolutions" - meaning, proposed solutions that exploit the flaw in the reward function, but which don't actually do anything useful. 

In this case we have a reward function that is supposed to pay miners for checking blocks and affirming that they are correct - but what it actually pays them for is agreeing with other miners about whether the blocks have been checked, and asserting that they are correct.  The miners evolved a pseudosolution that allows them to collect the reward without actually checking the blocks.

So how can we correct the reward function?  Is there some key the miners can't possibly know, some test they cannot pass, unless they have REALLY checked the blocks?

I have a feeling that the current bottom is over.  

There has been a very long period of things falling into place, slowly, in many different areas.  Many legal, perceptual, and technological obstacles have been removed.  Other obstacles that previously appeared to be very serious threats to long-term viability now are subject to strategies that will allow them to be overcome.

With Silk Road out of business, it's starting to be the case that I can convince people there exist non-criminal, non-dope-related reasons to have Bitcoin.  With regulators moving on the wreckage of Mt.Gox, it looks like there's going to be a legal framework that seeks and punishes fraudsters, and that's damned important when people are deciding what to put their money into.  

Then you've got investors starting to notice Bitcoin rallies fairly reliably on economic bad news from other parts of the economy and waking up to the idea that it makes a really nice hedge investment to round out a portfolio that is otherwise too exposed to financial-industry risk. You've got investment infrastructure popping up that lets fund managers use it for exactly that purpose, and ....  

And all of this has been happening, slowly, quietly, without major price disruptions.  

From time to time I've been seeing sort-of-diffuse movements of price driven by things that could be test runs of large systems, or could be large orders executed by sophisticated systems across many markets.  From time to time I've seen things happening that appear to be tests of market depth and response time.  And for quite a while (seven to nine months now?) I've been noticing a price/volume correlation where lower price means higher volume - a whole lot of somebodies, or maybe just a few somebodies with very deep pockets and a paranoid streak about not placing any single big orders, has been systematically, quietly buying whenever prices are down, at a rate that far exceeds normal dollar cost averaging.  I usually see that only when somebody or some institution is trying to enter a market quietly but in a large way and therefore has to take a long time.

I'm just getting this overwhelming feeling that things are ready to move - and something out in the rest of the world, like this vote in Greece or something, is going to provide the impetus for a big spike setting off the next cycle.

I think you have to separate the autistics and the psychopaths here.  The code was developed by some not-entirely-social engineers who might possibly have been autistic and/or Aspergers syndrome, and their entire point was telling people, Look, with crypto technology we're developing, you don't need to trust anybody with your money - especially not us!  No central point of control, nobody but you has your keys, nobody can take your coins or steal them without your cooperation.  And all of that?  That's true.  The "Autistics" actively developed a genuine trustless network where your keys are your money, you can check the blockchain yourself, and you don't have to share access to your money with anybody.  

The psychopaths came along later and built on the perception of a "trustless" network - while getting people to trust them (the psychopaths that is) with their keys and getting people to NOT check the blockchain themselves.  That's where we got web wallets, SPV clients, Mt.Gox, and all the con games that flatly wouldn't have worked if people used Bitcoin exactly like the "autistics" made it to be used.

This sounds reasonable, but seriously, America has some incredibly dumb criminals.  He's not even in the running compared to a guy who robbed a bank while wearing no mask, driving his own car, passed the holdup note to the teller written on the back of one of his own account's deposit slips at the same bank, and then got stuck in a multi-car pileup in the parking lot because his girlfriend lost control of her pet duck.  

Not saying that what Ulbricht did wasn't stupid of course.  It was.  It's just that you have to overcome some VERY stiff competition for the title of America's Dumbest Criminal.


Yep.  To develop businesses, you need people who treat it as a business.  Not as a game, or a hobby, or a scam.

That said, I'm tempted by a distinctly 'hobbyist' impulse myself - to copy the silk road website software (now in the public record as evidence) and set up a "homage" site selling perfectly legal silks and spices.  Of course, at that point I'd have to compete with Ebay and Amazon, so it would probably never be profitable.  

One way to think of this is that a group of Chinese miners just gave over $50K away to other miners, to reward those other miners for checking the block versions before building new blocks.

Terribly nice of them, really.  Though I'm sure they'd prefer to've collected the prize themselves, it's nice of them to "support" those who are doing a better job than they are.

So, for a few hours, if you were mining and actually checking blocks for validity, you were getting about double your usual rate of return.

"SPV mining" is one of those silly ideas like "virtual memory" or "virtual sex" - the real thing is always better.

As I explained to my wife when I decided to do some currency speculation in Bitcoin, "It's at least guaranteed to be free entertainment." 

Willy Bot, Silk Road, Force & Bridges, Mt.Gox implosion, Butterfly Labs, SEC regulation funnies, C&D letters, AML Fandango, Bribe-driven altcoin markets with pump&dump scams, idiots setting up gambling sites that allow cheating, Assassination politics, The Cyprus Haircut, the Greek Meltdown, the Eurozone crisis, China banning banks from dealing with it while subsidizing electricity for mining farms solely because the guys who set up the mining farms did a better job of bribery than the bankers, sites where idiots bet on stupid things so I could just take their money by betting on facts, Scammers with crypto locker, more scammers with mining botnets, more scammers still with covert mining software built into AAA games, people replacing building furnaces with mining rigs that subsidize their heating electricity, Bitcoin ATMs where people throw the "receipts" (WITH PRIVATE KEYS) in the trash because they don't understand what the hell they are.... 

Hell, we couldn't have got this much entertainment if we'd blown the entire amount on movie writers and producers.  Nor could I have made money testifying as an expert witness if this had all been Hollywood drama.

Wherever it ends up, it's a hell of a ride.

It might have helped with adoption, but after adoption you need legitimacy.  Silk Road had become a hindrance rather than a help, long before it got taken out. 

If your best-known or only known model lets people believe  Bitcoin is just a means of committing crime, then Bitcoin has no long-term value because it will be treated only as a means of committing crime.

In some kind of bizarro-land way, we are probably fortunate that the FBI agents investigating this case were so completely crooked.  It at least prevents people from neatly categorizing all the people doing business in Bitcoin as having been the only crooks involved.  Hey, a Bitcoin business was at least comparable in legitimacy to the FBI's finest!

This.  I'm glad to have the asshole behind bars 'cause he was bad for business, but I think a life sentence was unjustified considering that they didn't even get a conviction on the murder charge. 

The dude is a first offender.  As far as I'm concerned rape, torture and murder are really about the only things that can justify life sentences, and while there was a murder charge they could have prosecuted, they didn't.

Heh.  I hadn't encountered "80% receivers" yet.  People playing jump-rope with the legal line, bless 'em.  When I encountered people into this build-your-own thing, it was still a matter of starting with engineering drawings and bulk sheet metal.

Hm.  I wonder if the business about needing to actually fire a bullet was ever true.  I learned it from what may in retrospect be an unreliable source. 

At the very least, most so-called gun control laws are about selling and dealing and buying firearms - fabricating them for your own use is relatively unregulated. 

In the state where I grew up we had a gun control law I could seriously support - you had to show a certificate that you had completed a gun safety course before you could buy.  And I was on the high school varsity marksmanship team.

The US (and because of it a large chunk of the world) has a peculiar idea that the "receiver" is the crucial bit of a gun.  That is, the central block that everything else attaches to or screws onto.  So the receiver is the part that's regulated, controlled, etc.

The reason this is a peculiar idea is that the "receiver" is usually just a few bits of sheet metal cut, drilled, and bent to shape and then bolted - which  somebody could make in an afternoon in  a home shop. 

So for example someone could get mail-order parts for a barrel, a trigger, a magazine, sights, etc without incurring legal difficulties...  but would have to do legal and registration paperwork if they were to try to get a receiver.  Until they either buy a receiver, or else fabricate one AND assemble and fire the resulting gun, what they have is not legally a "firearm." 

Laws vary from place to place, so don't bet your freedom on this, but as I understand it, as long as you have not obtained a receiver, it is not legally a firearm. Any thing you have created in the shape and form of a receiver does not legally become a receiver, until you actually fire a bullet.  And at that point, if you created the receiver in your home shop rather than getting it from someone else, you are the manufacturer of the resulting firearm rather than anyone who manufactured or sold you any of the more difficult-to-fabricate parts. 

But there are lots of finicky bits to this law, so don't try funny stuff like buying a firearm outside the US and then importing everything EXCEPT the receiver -- it won't legally work the way you'd hope.  And if you live somewhere else, there are bound to be lots of finicky bits to your laws too, which I wouldn't even guess at.

Some folk will pay a slight premium for coins that have never been previously transacted.  But that doesn't depend at all on how long ago they were mined.

Right now there's a lot of wait-and-see.

I don't think Bitcoin will rise much higher than it has - at least not sustainably - until mainstream investment places and fund managers are satisfied that Bitcoin is able to scale to at least thousands of tx per second. 

Meaning, we not only need to make the block sizes bigger, but we also need to develop new technology.  Side Chains, Fractalized blocks, or ... whatever.  But right now it's not taken very seriously because, five transactions a second?  And with a 20Mbyte block it'll go up to maybe a hundred?  Don't make an investor (or a broker) laugh, that's not even a good attempt at a payment system that could get off the ground in a serious way.  And so it gets dismissed.

Bitcoin could go above its current value, and stay there, only if the scalability issue gets addressed in a credible way.

Don't you get it? 

YES, Colder Winters.  DUH, that's what people mean when they say more extreme temperature swings.

ALSO, Hotter Summers.  Same thing.  More extreme temperature swings.

People only called it "warming" because while this is all happening the AVERAGE temperature is going up.

A lot of people are upset about the increased regulation that Bitcoin is seeing.

That regulation came about as a direct result of Mt.Gox (and several others) failing to honor their commitments, and is mostly intended to prevent a recurrence.  Given what the effin' amateurs whose pretenses or attempts at doing solid business have cost Bitcoin holders so far, it's not a disproportionate response.

So, whatever other people feel about increased regulation, I can't say that it was the wrong thing to do.