There is nothing wrong with a fork. Let's just make sure the exchanges allow the exchange of both. If there are exchanges that intentionally block one over the other, the exchange is not a supporter of free markets.
The only problem is that CURRENTLY, real world merchants like Dish, Expedia, etc will only accept "Bitcoin". They will not bother accepting two coins, so most likely the fork with less mining power will die quickly and there will be miniscule demand for it. In the future if crypto becomes more mainstream, a fork that leaves two currencies will be more viable. Dude, no one is using Bitcoin to pay for his Dish bill. That type of use case is never going to make a difference... get some sense, won't you? Dish is definitely receiving Bitcoin payments. Yeah maybe some hardcore Bitcoin dude does it but if we are being honest this use case is negligible. |
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[Greg Maxwell:] For fees to achieve this purpose, there seemingly must be an effective
scarcity of capacity.
The error is in that very first claim. There need not be a scarcity of capacity for the fees to serve their purpose. The fees could, and should, be mandatory and set in the 'consensus rules'. In fact, scarcity of capacity in a network means lousy service, which means loss of users, which means that the fees will not rise as hoped.... Fortunately Bitcoin is not meant to be a service. You are interpreting the argument in the wrong way. There needs to be a scarcity in order for a fee market to be sustained. Fees need to adapt to the ever changing reality of the system and could not possibly be forced or determined through any algorithm. |
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It's important to consider those who forgo investing in utilizing the system because it is currently capped at 2.7 effective tps.
If you put the actual cost (without block reward) of processing a bitcoin transaction on the user, bitcoin would die tomorrow. Maybe not completely, but it would be like pokemon cards for the "old money" hodlers.
You may think that permissioned sidechains will deliver us from not having the throughput to survive on fees alone, but I think that's an even bigger gamble.
It sounds corny, I agree, but billyjoe's Scale or Die has some truth to it.
It is equally important to recognize the actual utility value of Bitcoin. I wouldn't blame anyone on foregoing transactional use of Bitcoin seeing its very real shortcomings as a payment system. Let us be honest with ourselves this system is absolutely not ready for mainstream consumer acceptance and we shouldn't be concerned about consumers looking the other way. Give it some time and the necessary infrastructure and tools to abstract the highly technical and generally confusing nature of Bitcoin will be built. We should also admit that these mainstream users looking for an efficient payment system do not care at all about the decentralization or security of the thing. Let's be real here regular joes just want something that works, centralized or not. The people pouring big money into Bitcoin (I'm talking about buying bitcoins) couldn't care about its transaction capacity at the moment. Most rational investors are in it for the long haul and a majority of the coins are kept in cold storage and paper wallets where they haven't and won't move for years. There shouldn't be any urgency to cater to a userbase which is inexistent as it stands. Technology will evolve over the next few years and will provide the necessary tools for proper, actual scaling of the system. No amount of block size increase will allow us to serve a mainstream consumer base doing hundreds of thousands of transactions per seconds. Bitcoin is not designed to handle this load while staying secure & decentralized. |
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Interestingly this is his last tweet: I'm getting a few mistaken follows due to sharing a name with a Bitcoin dev. I like Bitcoin, I wrote about it once, I don't develop for it. Well that's obviously cause it is indeed not the right guy  This is Mike's twitter account https://twitter.com/OctSkyward |
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I thought billyjoe was being silly and hyperbolic about the fight being over tor mining... Damn  Oh yeah, and we need to focus on building a fee market at the 25 per block level... When do you propose we focus on this? When they disappear? Raising the block size is basically a subsidy. If you insist on constantly subsidizing transactions cost people will begin expecting it and it will be considerably more difficult to say no in the future. That is the slippery slope of raising the block size. Miners are being subsidized in these early stages precisely because we want the security of the network to be greater than what would be provided using only the current fee income. This is part of BTC's competitive advantage. While this subsidy exists, the transaction cost should be as close to zero as possible to capture market share from other value transfer and storage systems. Growing now is what allows survival later. Of course there are limits and dangers, I haven't been convinced that removing the limit entirely is safe or wise. I most identify with Jeff Garzik's approach to this debate (maybe not in bip100's proposed mechanism), and hope we find some common ground. As I have just explained I think this is a dangerous road to follow as it amounts to selling people onto Bitcoin using features which are not inherent or guaranteed given its design. We should absolutely avoid the danger of instilling into Bitcoin users some kind of belief that they have a right to free transactions. Nothing in life is free and the costs of security & decentralization cannot forever be externalized to nodes & miners. In that sense it is perfectly reasonable to suggest we should strive to keep block size limit as close as possible to actual network demand. Flex cap proposals are interesting in this aspect. |
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1) We don't have a clear consensus building process. We need to decide if we want 75% consensus within 1000 blocks by the miners followed by 95% consensus within 1000 Blocks, or if we just want 80% consensus within 5000 blocks. We need a clear process.
>75% of miners willing to accept the change simply lets devs know it's safe to implement. dev's should reach consensus and use miner votes and BTC votes to help them reach consensus, would gavin had created bitcoinXT had he known <1% of miners would support it, while >60% support BIP100. i don't think he would of wasted his time. maybe he would of changed his mind and created a new BIP, but that's too late now, poor gavin cast away, forever? 75% is dangerously low... |
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the problem of not being able to implement "one man, one vote" in a decentralized manner is why we have things like proof of work in Bitcoin.
It's a tough nut to crack.
I find myself agreeing with you on that one! Good comment. |
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I thought billyjoe was being silly and hyperbolic about the fight being over tor mining... Damn Oh yeah, and we need to focus on building a fee market at the 25 per block level... When do you propose we focus on this? When the block reward disappears? Raising the block size is basically a subsidy. If you insist on constantly subsidizing transactions cost people will begin expecting it and it will be considerably more difficult to say no in the future. That is the slippery slope of raising the block size. |
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Many people mocked me many pages ago for my concern that the block size could not simply scale exponentially for the next 20 years, but I still believe we are reaching the limits of physics and any further significant exponential type gains in computing power beyond asic will likely take us beyond the singularity. I just hope our new synthetic overlords accept bitcoin. (Ok, yes, I've been watching too much humans (tv show))
Block size MUST scale exponentially whether it's simple or not. A crypto with a block size limit is analogous to an Internet with a bandwidth limit of 56K modems. No video. No VOIP. Vastly more limited functionality. It may be hard, but don't fucking tell me it's impossible. Some other crypto will do it if we don't. You are clearly clueless about why the block size limit is necessary and there in the first place. Go back to your homeworks. First assignement: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-May/007880.htmlTo elaborate, in my view there is a at least a two fold concern on this
particular ("Long term Mining incentives") front:
One is that the long-held argument is that security of the Bitcoin system
in the long term depends on fee income funding autonomous, anonymous,
decentralized miners profitably applying enough hash-power to make
reorganizations infeasible.
For fees to achieve this purpose, there seemingly must be an effective
scarcity of capacity. The fact that verifying and transmitting
transactions has a cost isn't enough, because all the funds go to pay
that cost and none to the POW "artificial" cost; e.g., if verification
costs 1 then the market price for fees should converge to 1, and POW
cost will converge towards zero because they adapt to whatever is
being applied. Moreover, the transmission and verification costs can
be perfectly amortized by using large centralized pools (and efficient
differential block transmission like the "O(1)" idea) as you can verify
one time instead of N times, so to the extent that verification/bandwidth
is a non-negligible cost to miners at all, it's a strong pressure to
centralize. You can understand this intuitively: think for example of
carbon credit cap-and-trade: the trade part doesn't work without an
actual cap; if everyone was born with a 1000 petaton carbon balance,
the market price for credits would be zero and the program couldn't hope
to share behavior. In the case of mining, we're trying to optimize the
social good of POW security. (But the analogy applies in other ways too:
increases to the chain side are largely an externality; miners enjoy the
benefits, everyone else takes the costs--either in reduced security or
higher node operating else.)
This area has been subject to a small amount of academic research
(e.g. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2400519). But
there is still much that is unclear.
The second is that when subsidy has fallen well below fees, the incentive
to move the blockchain forward goes away. An optimal rational miner
would be best off forking off the current best block in order to capture
its fees, rather than moving the blockchain forward, until they hit
the maximum. That's where the "backlog" comment comes from, since when
there is a sufficient backlog it's better to go forward. I'm not aware
of specific research into this subquestion; it's somewhat fuzzy because
of uncertainty about the security model. If we try to say that Bitcoin
should work even in the face of most miners being profit-maximizing
instead of altruistically-honest, we must assume the chain will not
more forward so long as a block isn't full. In reality there is more
altruism than zero; there are public pressures; there is laziness, etc. There will never be no limit. Sure, we could remove the limit from consensus requirements (which I would actually support), but transactions still have a cost. They have to be verified and then stored until all outputs are spent. This requires storage hardware and bandwidth. Also, larger blocks will be orphaned more frequently, providing additional pressure for miners to voluntarily keep blocks small. Did you bother reading this part? The fact that verifying and transmitting transactions has a cost isn't enough, because all the funds go to pay that cost and none to the POW "artificial" cost; e.g., if verification costs 1 then the market price for fees should converge to 1, and POW cost will converge towards zero because they adapt to whatever is being applied. Moreover, the transmission and verification costs can be perfectly amortized by using large centralized pools (and efficient differential block transmission like the "O(1)" idea) as you can verify one time instead of N times, so to the extent that verification/bandwidth is a non-negligible cost to miners at all, it's a strong pressure to centralize. This pressure for miners to keep blocks small is temporary and will eventually decline and disappear, it's already starting to seeing as numerous improvements have been made in improving general block propagation time between miners. |
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I'm confused, first you make a thread saying you don't want to democracy but then you turn around and create one arguing that we must find a way to vote? You're making this more complicated than it really is. Stop trying to "fix" Bitcoin as it is perfectly fine as it is. Achieving consensus should be hard and some "vote theater" is not gonna help it. Just be patient and stop believing the alarmists. You are erroneously equating democracy with voting. Voting =/= Democracy. When I say we don't want a democracy, I mean we don't want a majority rule where 51% is all it takes to win and then we have 49% unhappy and disappointed people. This kind of system will rip bitcoin in two. Instead we should have a Consensus Building Process by which we gradually mold the proposals until we arrive at 95%+ approval. There are several different ways of doing this and this has been done several times in Bitcoin's history already, but all of them involve voting. The Major difference is that with a Consensus Building Process people need the ability to change their votes, in a democracy you vote once and then that's it, you can't change your mind.
With a Consensus Building Process the proposals are tweaked and amended according to critiques and concerns of the voters until there emerges a proposal that is good enough to reach 75%+ votes. In a democracy the choices are static, and you just vote on the choices presented which do not change, and are often all poor solutions.In both scenarios there is voting. In one scenario there are winners and losers, and in the other we are all winners. Votes can be cheated, gamed, bought. I personally don't believe they're a good and transparent way of achieving consensus. |
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Many people mocked me many pages ago for my concern that the block size could not simply scale exponentially for the next 20 years, but I still believe we are reaching the limits of physics and any further significant exponential type gains in computing power beyond asic will likely take us beyond the singularity. I just hope our new synthetic overlords accept bitcoin. (Ok, yes, I've been watching too much humans (tv show))
Block size MUST scale exponentially whether it's simple or not. A crypto with a block size limit is analogous to an Internet with a bandwidth limit of 56K modems. No video. No VOIP. Vastly more limited functionality. It may be hard, but don't fucking tell me it's impossible. Some other crypto will do it if we don't. You are clearly clueless about why the block size limit is necessary and there in the first place. Go back to your homeworks. First assignement: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-May/007880.htmlTo elaborate, in my view there is a at least a two fold concern on this
particular ("Long term Mining incentives") front:
One is that the long-held argument is that security of the Bitcoin system
in the long term depends on fee income funding autonomous, anonymous,
decentralized miners profitably applying enough hash-power to make
reorganizations infeasible.
For fees to achieve this purpose, there seemingly must be an effective
scarcity of capacity. The fact that verifying and transmitting
transactions has a cost isn't enough, because all the funds go to pay
that cost and none to the POW "artificial" cost; e.g., if verification
costs 1 then the market price for fees should converge to 1, and POW
cost will converge towards zero because they adapt to whatever is
being applied. Moreover, the transmission and verification costs can
be perfectly amortized by using large centralized pools (and efficient
differential block transmission like the "O(1)" idea) as you can verify
one time instead of N times, so to the extent that verification/bandwidth
is a non-negligible cost to miners at all, it's a strong pressure to
centralize. You can understand this intuitively: think for example of
carbon credit cap-and-trade: the trade part doesn't work without an
actual cap; if everyone was born with a 1000 petaton carbon balance,
the market price for credits would be zero and the program couldn't hope
to share behavior. In the case of mining, we're trying to optimize the
social good of POW security. (But the analogy applies in other ways too:
increases to the chain side are largely an externality; miners enjoy the
benefits, everyone else takes the costs--either in reduced security or
higher node operating else.)
This area has been subject to a small amount of academic research
(e.g. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2400519). But
there is still much that is unclear.
The second is that when subsidy has fallen well below fees, the incentive
to move the blockchain forward goes away. An optimal rational miner
would be best off forking off the current best block in order to capture
its fees, rather than moving the blockchain forward, until they hit
the maximum. That's where the "backlog" comment comes from, since when
there is a sufficient backlog it's better to go forward. I'm not aware
of specific research into this subquestion; it's somewhat fuzzy because
of uncertainty about the security model. If we try to say that Bitcoin
should work even in the face of most miners being profit-maximizing
instead of altruistically-honest, we must assume the chain will not
more forward so long as a block isn't full. In reality there is more
altruism than zero; there are public pressures; there is laziness, etc. |
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In general, my concerns would be having plenty of extra room in case there is a spike
in adoption, and not being forced off the main chain.
That's the problem, you can't do that. There is simply no reasonable way to plan for security if you make decisions based on speculative adoption assumptions |
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Democracy is dictatorship by the majority.
Bitcoin is a Democracy by definition. or maybe more of a "Democracy with exile" what is bitcoin? Nodes express their acceptance of a new block by mining on top of it and the longest chain composed of valid transactions is Bitcoin. there you go the bitcoin = whatever the majority of hashing power believes is bitcoin. What a twisted idea. So if "the majority of hashing power", say, 55%, starts mining Kanyecoin rather than Bitcoin than it becomes Bitcoin? says satoshi it really has to be a fork of bitcoin with the majority of hashing power  No. Bitcoin is defined by the consensus rules defined in the software the nodes run. Not what some miners decides to mine... what no i'm telling you what the "consensus rules" are, Nodes express their acceptance of a new block by mining on top of it and the longest chain composed of valid transactions is Bitcoin. this is from the white paper. and it wouldn't make any sense any other way. That is a common misconception of what actually happens. Here: Not really. "the longest chain" is ambiguous. It should really be "the longest valid chain", and then you need to define which coin's concept of "validity" you're using. Every client follows the longest valid chain - that's precisely how they decide which chain to follow.
...
Litecoin forked from Bitcoin. Its chain grows 4 times faster than Bitcoin's. There's a 0% chance that Bitcoin can catch up with the length of Litecoin's chain. Nobody cares. Core ignores the Litecoin chain in the same way that it will ignore the XTcoin chain once XT's chain becomes incompatible with Bitcoin's.
Your welcome. |
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Consider that some of these mining firms have other revenue streams. You cite BitMain and it is an absolutely perfect example. Considering the amount of money and profit they make selling mining gear. Do you actually believe that they need to sell any % of the bitcoins they mine to cover expenses?
Selling mining gear is a welcome addition to mining yourself (unless it dilutes you too much via difficulty, an OCDM would likely frown on selling to the public), Bitmain's prices seem to track what the device might return before it becomes inefficient. It's almost like selling a bond to another bond investor.
Another example is BitFury which is getting fed by VC money at record rates and have also, in the past, had their fair share of surely spectacular revenues and profit selling their mining gears. Now we don't actually have to speculate about them since they have made it clear in interviews they are absolutely not considering selling any of the bitcoins they mine.
These together amount to nearly 25% of the network. Would you like to suggest they are the exception?
VC funded mining operations as the new 2012 guy with GPU's mining at a loss... I like it. For everyone else, profit vs loss is a more tenuous balance, and as a whole, I think the industry sells more as a % vs the hobbyist days. Did you not read what I wrote? I won't bother hunting down the source because you are apparently too obtuse to change your mind about it but a BitFury is not alone in publicly stating they are not selling their bitcoins. Selling mining gear is by all account a ridiculously profitable business because if it weren't they wouldn't bother with it and just use the gear to mine themselves as you've stated. It is quite likely the profit they derive from it is well enought to cover a large portion of their expenses. |
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Democracy is dictatorship by the majority.
Bitcoin is a Democracy by definition. or maybe more of a "Democracy with exile" what is bitcoin? Nodes express their acceptance of a new block by mining on top of it and the longest chain composed of valid transactions is Bitcoin. there you go the bitcoin = whatever the majority of hashing power believes is bitcoin. What a twisted idea. So if "the majority of hashing power", say, 55%, starts mining Kanyecoin rather than Bitcoin than it becomes Bitcoin? says satoshi it really has to be a fork of bitcoin with the majority of hashing power No. Bitcoin is defined by the consensus rules defined in the software the nodes run. Not what some miners decides to mine... |
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There is nothing wrong with a fork. Let's just make sure the exchanges allow the exchange of both. If there are exchanges that intentionally block one over the other, the exchange is not a supporter of free markets.
The only problem is that CURRENTLY, real world merchants like Dish, Expedia, etc will only accept "Bitcoin". They will not bother accepting two coins, so most likely the fork with less mining power will die quickly and there will be miniscule demand for it. In the future if crypto becomes more mainstream, a fork that leaves two currencies will be more viable. Dude, no one is using Bitcoin to pay for his Dish bill. That type of use case is never going to make a difference... get some sense, won't you? |
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I think the core issue we face is twofold:
1) We don't have a clear consensus building process. We need to decide if we want 75% consensus within 1000 blocks by the miners followed by 95% consensus within 1000 Blocks, or if we just want 80% consensus within 5000 blocks. We need a clear process.
2) We Need a way for more than just the miners to vote. BIP100 is the perfect example as to why. If the miners are the only ones who have a say, then they can vote in BIP's that appeal to their interests but not necessarily to the interests of the entire community. Having only the miners vote has worked in the past but no longer. Now the miners are a small percentage of the bitcoin community whereas in the past they were a much larger percentage.
I think the problem with 1) is that we need a consensus building process to arrive at consensus as to which consensus building process we are going to choose. It's a chicken or the egg kind of problem. And I think with 2) we need a genius to come up with a solution that allows that all people have a fair say somehow.
Are there any geniuses out there with any ideas as to how we might do this??
I'm confused, first you make a thread saying you don't want to democracy but then you turn around and create one arguing that we must find a way to vote? You're making this more complicated than it really is. Stop trying to "fix" Bitcoin as it is perfectly fine as it is. Achieving consensus should be hard and some "vote theater" is not gonna help it. Just be patient and stop believing the alarmists. |
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Democracy is dictatorship by the majority.
Bitcoin is a Democracy by definition. or maybe more of a "Democracy with exile" what is bitcoin? Nodes express their acceptance of a new block by mining on top of it and the longest chain composed of valid transactions is Bitcoin. there you go the bitcoin = whatever the majority of hashing power believes is bitcoin. What a twisted idea. So if "the majority of hashing power", say, 55%, starts mining Kanyecoin rather than Bitcoin than it becomes Bitcoin? |
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Good points. You can never totally get rid of bad actors that intentionally disturb the decisoin making process
- snip -
I'm not talking about "bad actors". The fact that someone has a different goal than you doesn't necessarily mean that your goal is "good" and theirs is "bad". The point is that a "Consensus Building Process" can't work if participants goals don't align, especially if the participants are passionate about their goals. If consensus isn't working toward realizing their goal maybe they need to double-check their priorities and either a. compromise or b. exit and create a group of like-minded people. Free market still operates in consensus-style decision making and if someone is convinced that their goals is more valuable then others they should absolutely leave it to the market to decide. One should be careful though about the means by which they introduce their different proposal as it could cost them greatly if people start discerning hidden motives and intentions not properly disclaimed. Consensus sounds like a great idea, but may not always work. Democracy may not work either. A dictatorship, benevolent or malevolent, can make things happen very quickly and win a game in the right circumstances. One of those circumstances might be if a democracy or consensus is stuck in minutia, missing a bigger picture, while a dictatorship conceives and idea and quickly executes it overtaking both consensus and democracy. I hope that Bitcoin can find consensus, but will settle for democracy. I do not want dictatorship. Certainly more than one dictatorship with concepts already. Democracy is dictatorship by the majority. The rest of your concerns are absolutely valid and amount to what Hayek referred to as the "Road to Serfdom" You may be right. This is the first I've seen the idea of consensus on a political/government scale, and need to consider it more, especially in light of the power of technology. However, my first gut reaction is that consensus is not possible. I see two immediate concerns: 1) No two people think 100% alike, and the minority in a consensus must concede to the majority anyhow. I think maybe a democracy is more honest in that an actual vote takes place. Vote can be traded, based on importance. Hence, politics come in to play. (Yuck, but reality). 2) If one person refuses to a consensus, either the rest of the consensus moves on without them (in which we are back to a dictatorship by democracy), or consensus never occurs and a decision is not made. This can work for a while, but evolution does not stop. Ultimately, the beauty of Bitcoin is the open source nature and the ability for anyone to use it how they please. What I have realized is that the ability to freely pick and choose your money is more important than ever. Any impediment to currency exchange and transmission, no matter what form it takes, is an assault on human rights and dignity.You are ignoring one aspect which is vital to consensus: reputation. The major difference between democracy and consensus is that not all votes are equal. Some vetos weight more than others. An outlier willing to use his veto to stop progress needs to consider the strenght of his reputation and the validity of his arguments. If both are poor you are correct that consensus might move against him and that is perfectly normal. If that person is being intellectually honest she might realize the need to compromise on what might not have been the best idea in the first place or effectively exile himself from the decision process. Now of course reputations are built and destroyed all the time. In that sense consensus has a very meritocratic aspect to it. |
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My personal impression is that hash rate is dictated by price and (more importantly?) technology, with rate reacting to price and not the inverse. The two big ramps were directly related to a paradigm shift in mining tech, CPU to GPU, and GPU to ASIC. With ASIC gear becoming increasingly efficient we will probably see a rise in hashrate even in the face of a flat or modestly declining price. The upcoming halving should be pretty interesting for those watching this relationship.
Agreed. Hashrate should follow price, but it seems like during those two massive increases it was the price chasing the hashrate.... Someone better suited to scientific analysis of data sets would do a better job of analyzing this relationship ( hint, hint, Professor Stolfi )  Anyways, I don't expect any further large expansions in mining technology or efficiency, certainly nothing on the scale of cpu>gpu>asic. Many people mocked me many pages ago for my concern that the block size could not simply scale exponentially for the next 20 years, but I still believe we are reaching the limits of physics and any further significant exponential type gains in computing power beyond asic will likely take us beyond the singularity. I just hope our new synthetic overlords accept bitcoin. (Ok, yes, I've been watching too much humans (tv show)) The big difference this time around... We have our own little OPEC (OCDM organization of chip designing miners), with apparently only bitmain selling next gen hardware to the small fish. Small fish are more likely to mine and hoard, using it almost as a form of indirect purchase. The current dynamic makes me think that as a percentage, more coins are being mined and sold than in days of yore. The days of mining at a loss with your gaming rig in 2012 are surely over. Contrary to popular opinion I am confident that a considerable (it may be a majority) part of newly minted bitcoins are being held. Meaning their profit margin may be > 50% of their revenue?  Consider that some of these mining firms have other revenue streams. You cite BitMain and it is an absolutely perfect example. Considering the amount of money and profit they make selling mining gear. Do you actually believe that they need to sell any % of the bitcoins they mine to cover expenses? Another example is BitFury which is getting fed by VC money at record rates and have also, in the past, had their fair share of surely spectacular revenues and profit selling their mining gears. Now we don't actually have to speculate about them since they have made it clear in interviews they are absolutely not considering selling any of the bitcoins they mine. These together amount to nearly 25% of the network. Would you like to suggest they are the exception? |
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