The Cambridge University academics (Michel Rauchs and Garrick Hileman) behind this report posted about it on Bitcointalk: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1860976

I replied:



No response as yet from the either of the two Cambridge University academics to my question.

Well, I think a whole new machine is definitely needed to test which of the components in the system is broken. Just wondering if my budget can stretch to a Xeon... we'll see. Thanks for your thoughts on the matter ck, you helped me think it through. In the meantime, I think I might have to keep a second copy on the other SSD, hopefully that'll spare any more of the (several) IBD's I've had to do in the short term, and possibly confirm instead that both SSDs are losing writable flash cells quicker than I thought was possible (using an Intel 320 and Samsung 830, incidentally, both have decent reputations for good firmware and hard wearing MLC flash cells)

And Bitfinex are loving every bit of free positive publicity they are consistently getting from you, BurtW.


You should ask Bitfinex if they will offer you a paycheck for your kind words, I understand that subtle user-driven product placement type advertising is actually the most effective way to sell a business.

Seeing as Bitfinex haven't actually repaid any clients their fiat money, you may end up getting paid in their debt-tokens, but hey, you believe so strongly in their solvency, I'm sure you'd accept BFX debt in payment for the service you're, currently, providing for free.

Could that really happen with 2 separate SSDs though? I deliberately switched from an older 256GB (more used drive) to the newest/largest I have with that possibility faintly in mind (and SSDs don't fail catastrophically AFAIA, the read operation is very reliable even when SSD cells no longer write reliably). I never really believed the problem could actually be the disk itself failing, but you've got me thinking here.

Could it maybe be some aspect of the SATA controller that's failing? I intended to get a new machine later this year anyway, I may have to bring that forward.

Exactly.

"The entire community" rejected 3 separate big blocks proposals in as many years. jonald is obsessed with talking (and lying) about the case for big blocks, as usual

Right, but remember what you're agreeing to here: LTC has less need for Lightning Network, even when it hasn't hit it's blocksize capacity, due to it's low block interval (1 minutes average IIRC).

Litecoin was supposed to be the original "solution" to the Bitcoin 10 minute block interval, and the market more or less decided that Litecoin doesn't really work for on-chain fast payments, as the orphan blocks/blockchain reorganisation risk is too high with Litecoin, one may as well wait 10 minutes worth of Litecoin blocks to be confident that a given transaction is definitively confirmed in the Litecoin blockchain (i.e. Satoshi knew exactly what he was doing with his 10 minute block interval, and Litecoin is a flawed concept)

Do you still believe that Litecoin can reach it's full on-chain capacity, so that Lightning on Litecoin actually becomes necessary, despite any technical improvements in Litecoin's orphan or re-org rate? I don't buy that right now, as is the case with all other cryptocurrencies (I didn't even buy any Monero, despite liking it more than the others)

This.

No-one listens to The Vermin about anything else in Bitcoin, and his "big announcement" was just a re-hashing of the same allegations that Roger and his disciples have been bleeting about for over 6 months.

The proof is evident, no-one much likes or trusts Ver now, and the market players in particular are unlikely to be treating his words seriously ("Mt Gox is solvent" debacle, reneging on the BTC/BTU with Loaded, etc)

Jonald: "We the market, should choose BU"

We the Market: "Uhhhh, no, let's use the same power of choice to user activate Segwit instead"

Jonald: "Bu... bu... bu.... bu.... bu..... but that's buckling! Your choice is called buckling, when I want you to choose something, it's called choosing"


Take the hint Jonald, fuck off

Both this and the India story belong in the Speculation section, I give zero fucks about what the Russian mafia may or may not do (for the quadrillionth time), and I give zero fucks if they ever actually do make a substantive and/or lasting "legal" mandate anyway

You think too simplistically for how Bitcoin works, despite the fact you've been here as long as me. You never learn anything from the huge amount of good information that gets disseminated on Bitcointalk, so I have zero sympathy with capitalists that don't know how to capitalise.

I mean c'mon, you're using an online wallet? That denominates the fee in words like "fast" and "default"? You don't know what you're doing, and it's been how many years since you make an average 5 posts a day? Do you ever read anything on here, like the billions of threads about fee rates and how to set them, some of which you post in? Your posts are a waste of everyone's time, including yours. It's like listening to someone who isn't into Bitcoin talking about Bitcoin, for 5 years.

Is it not the case that both coins need malleability fixed for atomic cross-chain swaps to work?

If so, Litecoin will be able to transfer directly in a single joint transaction between Litecoin and.... Litecoin? As Litecoin would be the only Segwit coin out there? There is maybe one more cryptocoin out there with Segwit.... which is even more obscure, under-used and under accepted than Litecoin itself.


And that brings us to the elephant in the room: Litecoin's use and acceptance. Which is some small fraction of it's transaction capacity as far as usage goes, and the acceptance (by merchants) is essentially zero. The positive feedback loop required to get the Litecoin transaction rate up to where off-chain 2nd payers are needed is very, very far from getting off the ground.


And so, I'm not sure what you think you're getting at really. To buy Litecoin, one must first buy Bitcoin with fiat, then buy Litecoin with Bitcoin. Unless you're accepting BTC or LTC directly of course, but the reality is that BTC is becoming less accepted than it used to be. What makes you think LTC is going to start taking off with merchants where BTC is receding? Call it "maximalist" or whatever, I call it plain reality.

Began to experience this again (blocks don't get retained from apparently random points from the various block heights I commence catch-up from)

Still using 0.13.2, except bad shutdown didn't seem to provoke it this time. Another thing I'm seeing is that bitcoind.pid remains in the .bitcoin directory after Bitcoin-qt shits down (pretty sure .pid files should only exist while it's corresponding program is running)

No, that's also just numbers on a page. Since when did the SEC and Google develop so trustworthy a reputation that we can believe anything written in a report they write, that contains no actual evidence?

Face it, believing the contents of SEC revenue reports is exactly that: belief.


I'm not saying I know the reports are false. I'm saying that no-one (except SEC and Google themselves) know what the truth is.


Part of my appreciation for Bitcoin (and I'd like to think everyone who appreciates Bitcoin understands the same thing) is that the standard of proof for what happens on the network is unimpeachable. I have high standards in general, and Google and the SEC no longer represent practice of high standards with their pieces of paper that basically amount to nothing more than a chain of rich privileged technology tsars and accountants doing pinky swears.

I don't trust a chain of bible swearing, I trust a chain of SHA-2 hashed datasets, performed by anyone with the resources to do it.

Uh, anybody home?

We're all in Bitcoin to counteract a...... wait for it........ drumrolllll...........


Designed Economic phenomena, fiat currency. Created by the individuals behind the Central Banks.


Your as obsessed with Hayek and Mises as you are with John Nash. Their observations were astute, but you've fetishised them way beyond their worth. The real world is even more complicated, and I only have to choose 1 simple example to demonstrate you're wrong.

How about these....




&&



I think that should make the picture a little clearer, wouldn't you say

I agree with you, but the move still makes sense.


The fundamental problem is access to manufacturing, and design. Even a CPU only PoW has this problem, there's a more serious monopoly there with high performance integer specific (which I think hash functions uniformly handle, anyone?) computation units, and they're called Intel. A whole panoply of problems stems from that particular monopoly too.

But, we can level the playing field that bit extra by changing to CPU only mining. ASICs are even more cartelised than Intel's monopoly, simply because Intel chips don't have the huge price gouging markups that Antminer and others can afford to charge. Mining with ASICs has been highly uncompetitive for independents right from the start.

And we're buying time by changing PoW. Time to test ideas like randomly changing PoW hashing (as you mention), or even requiring a series of 10 different hashing algos per block header attempt (Meni Rosenfeld's idea).

And the endgame is 3D printing of silicon (or other substrate...) ASIC processors. Even then, the company that sells the silicon and copper can begin to get in on the action in the same way nVidia or Intel could. But it still levels the playing field that bit more. If we could use a nitrogen or iron based processor substrate for 3D printing, someone might still find a way to monoplised or cartelise the most abundant elements on earth.

But let's get there one step at a time. The current miners have demonstarted all too well that power has corrupted them as much as anyone else, so we must work towards the most free market possible. I feel for the honest miners, but, if they're honest with themselves as well as the Bitcoin network they contribute to, they're getting ripped off and losing in this situation too. Mining rigs are only one part of the miners infrastructure, small miners will win out in the end.

Even if you were right amanda85, you do realise that people exist that may not have decided, yet? And, heaven forefend, they can even *gasp* change their mind? Y'know, a "free" market?


The market isn't frozen in suspended animation for all time, individual people make decisions, which can include making no decision at all, as well as changing from one preference to another. If that's OK with you, that is? We wouldn't want to offend your own personal definition of what "free market" means, now would we?

And your premise is wrong anyway. If people didn't choose Segwit, why did they choose Bitcoin 0.13.1 in such large numbers, so quickly? That was a far better test than your Litecoin proxy, as 13.1 was the Segwit changes only, and 13.1 was actually Bitcoin, Litecoin is something different to Bitcoin. That's why they've got different software, different networks (and different names, lol)

3, 2, 1 before the communists accuse me of capitalism and the capitalists accuse me of being a commie

@Dino, you're wrong.


Both emergent economic phenomena (resulting from individual action) and designed economic phenomena (resulting from collective action) are part of the real world.

They intertwine with each other in complex feedback loops, where the consequences of individual action compel changes in collective action, and vice versa, all in a cascade of collectives and individuals existing and acting at different scales.


Bitcoin's effect on our world is a perfect example of this.


Bitcoin was written by an individual. Or a collective, no one knows. Both one and many, unknowably.

Bitcoin is a collective of Bitcoin nodes, operating in concert. All run the same consensus rules, like a commune.

But then individuals start making individualistic decisions within the collective we know as the Bitcoin network. They chose how much mining power they used, and so how much BTC they earned from mining. They chose how much to keep, when to sell (if at all), and how much they sold for, and what they buy with their BTC.

Bitcoin exchanges were established. Initially, an individual exchange, MtGox. Which was not Mark Karpeles working alone, he relied on external collectives (ISPs, hosting companies, office letting agencies) and individuals (programmers he hired, support staff he hired), to form his collective. Which together, was an individual company called Mt Gox. The Many is the One, the One is The Many.

Then more exchanges emerged, the individual MtGox was joined by bitcoin.de and BTC-e, and so on. They were indiviudal companies, within an overall collective of Bitcoin exchanges, and today they behave both ways. Exchanges have individual policies, websites and premises. But they pool liquidity in a collective, using the Liquid sidechain. And they mostly (looking at BTC-e as the exception here) conform to a collective ruleset (KYC & AML), determined by another collective of individuals, the international finance lobby.

Bitcoin development grew into a collective. Of individuals. They don't all think the same thing at the same time, like an ant colony or a flock of birds. But they do agree to overall directions in development, whereby a smaller collective of individuals within the development team takes the casting vote on ideas advanced and conceived by individuals (those with the repo keys, Wladimir, Pieter, Suhas, etc)

The Many is the One, the One is The Many, within the One, comprised of Many.

And let's not forget that these interlocking fractal pattern of individuals within collectives, which themselves operate as bigger individuals within larger collectives are pursuing a specific purpose: to unseat a powerful collective of individuals (the world's central banks), which themselves are presided over by a collective of powerful organisations (i.e. IMF, BIS etc), which in turn are run by some of the most powerful individuals on the planet.


So, I hope you can see that your Mises/Hayek inspired appraisal is too simplistic to describe what is, as opposed to the idealised philosophical polarisation that it actually is.

Where's this all coming from? Me. I've never heard an economist that doesn't take the view of 100% this ideology, or 100% that ideology. You're well versed in economic theorists though Dino, is this a novel approach, lest we must call it Carlton's Economics?

We need to fire the miners by changing the proof of work. They've got too much power, and this behaviour (amongst so much other poor faith behaviour) only demonstrates it further. PoW should be changed before these miners escalate their malign and selfish behaviour, if we wait until they do it, the results will be far more catastrophic.

I hate to sound alarmist, but it wants to happen yesterday. BU can still hard-fork away from Bitcoin by the rogue miners anyway, regardless what the users want. And I've outlined before, they could screw things up really, really badly if they attack without mercy or shame. Who wants to risk that? Not me