Pool operators might have another incentive to make blocks massive too: to make it infeasible for the users of pools to check the blocks the pool has them working on. History has already shown that pool owners can get away with some pretty questionable stuff wthout users caring one whit just so long as money still keeps coming in.

But maybe that doesn't matter either, since after blocks are completed people can point to whatever nasty underhanded things the pool operator did with the hashing power the users put at their disposal and it will be seen again that the pool-users just don't care.

How far does/can/will that go, I wonder?

"Oh crybabies, moaning that our high paying pool enabled a bunch of double-spend attacks, if you care about double spends pay more protection money uh I mean insurance..." ?

By the way thanks for digging deep for your best counter-arguments, excellent work.

I saw an entire documentary once on the destruction of an entire culture, way of life, and community by "dumping" of cheap flour from over the mountain pass that is only navigable for a brief period each year. Pretty soon that cheap flour left all the independent landowning families who had lived well there for centuries out their land and their independent way of life, reduced, those of them who could even kiss enough ass to land such a "wonderful", "civilised" job to bell-hops and such in the tourist hotels that took their ancestral land right out from under them.

Just dumping simple sacks of flour "cheaper" (hidden costs such as loss of ancestral lands and independent lifestyles remaining hidden until it was "too late" to save them) than one could get it from the neighboring family you and your ancestors had traded with for generations pretty much threw everyone out of their own ancestral homes and reduced a free, independent people into servitude to their foreign new "masters".

So the claim that "dumping" never works seems somewhat dubious to me...

-MarkM-

Huh? That is news to me, where did you discover that very important tidbit?

-MarkM-

The miners can mine a secondary chain pretty much as easily as they could mine double-sized blocks on the primary chain.

The primary good provided by the primary chain is the most difficult proof of work on the planet. Providing that with as few overhead costs such as bandwidth and storage as possible seems like a very good idea, the old do one thing and do it well approach. Accommodating day to day expenses, maybe even accommodating monthly salary paycheques, can easily be delegated to a secondary chain, and even smaller amounts to more secondary chains, allowing the primary chain to as efficiently as possible enable as many hashers as possible to contribute to the difficult work, fully verifying not just blindly rubber-stamping, while accommodating no more transactions, of no less value per transaction, than is absolutely necessary, taking into account the ability to apply that work to as many secondary chains as might turn out to be needed to accomodate any amount of increase in transaction volumes, even all the way down to children buying penny-candy on the latest and leastest secondary chain with its brownie-point coins that kindergartens and homeschoolers worldwide use to incentivise children to learn and teach them how the vast and variegated world of cryptocurrency works and thus to reap transaction fees on as many chains as they choose to scale themselves up to be able to merge all at once.

-MarkM-

Or p2pool?

-MarkM-

TL;DR: Maybe factor in exchange-rates, since the more massively and swiftly the value of a coin skyrockets the more enthusasts who picked up a few coins while they were still available for less than a hundred bucks each might become rich enough to be able to consider setting themselves up a full node...


If bitcoin exchange rates continue to skyrocket, at some point even people who only managed to scrape together a fraction of a coin, or lets say, maybe such a huge fraction of a coin that we might as well call it a whole coin to keep our numbers simple, could be in a position to blow that entire coin, which might have taken them many months to accumulate by applying all their included-in-rent electricity and all the hardware they could scape up, on a full-node-capability home-internet system, *if* we don't raise the bar faster than even such devoted enthusiasts are able to keep up.

Do we want a full node to be forever out of such a devoted follower's reach, or would it be preferable that that carrot hovering before their eyes be attainable if they are actually able to make use of their existing hardware budget and pre-paid electricity efficiently (and never spend a satoshi of the satoshis p2pool doles out to them)

Just trying to get some soundings of various data-points. Right now, without increasing the maximum block size, and actually maybe even if we do increase it in a Moore's Law fashion of 50% per year or 100% per eighteen months, it does not seem inconceivable that a truly dedicated and technically competent enthusiast could dream of eventually buying a full node with their strictly hoarded bitcoins...

-MarkM-

So then we should just remove all limit on block size and see how many movies people decide to store in the primary blockchain using a minor modification of the "store movies in the namecoin blockchain" tool currently being ooh'd and aah'd over in the Alternative Cryptocurrencies forum and just see how farkin big the blockchain can get when fees are not justifiable anymore except possibly as anti-spam measures (and whats with calling movies spam, anyway, scared of needing a little bit of space or bandwidth or something?)

-MarkM-

DId you read that entire thread, though, and related threads?

Apparently the ideal, for a miner, is to ignore/be-ignored-by just under half of the hashing-power.

Make your blocks big enough that only 51% of the hashing power will have time to process it.

That way the top 51% of miners drive out all competitors, while the number of them that are still part of the top 51% after each round of ousting of the minority goes down and down, until it is down to just a few super-powers, among which 51% of the hashing power still might add up to less than all of those superpowers, resulting in even superpowers starting to be squeezed out, and so on...

-MarkM-

Well for starters they need not use "previously unheard-of transactions" to pad blocks, they can spam their spam like Satoshi Dice does, heck they can even buy shares of Satoshi Dice and promote Satoshi Dice and lobby the Foundation for the inalienable right of every two-bit loser's losses to be primary-blockchain news items (which is kind of, like, way the heck more massively globally important than mere front-page-news items).

Where does the idea one has to hide one's padding come from? The pathetically trivial transaction fees that increasing the block size kind of undermines the justification for?

Observe historical behavior of miners: spending ten million dollars up front in order to have a slight edge a year down the line, for example as they have done with Butterfly Labs in the ASIC saga. And still they are enthusiastic, still thinking its a good thing they blew that ten million way back when because this year, finally, they might actually start to see some of that hoped-for edge. Meanwhile just holding coins would have appreciated how much in that same span of time?

I think it is clear that throwing vast sums of money into slim chances of even a slight edge is not at all unlikely behavior for miners.

So we could start out with a guess at how much spam ten million dollars would buy, then maybe allow for bitcoin appreciation to realise that those who did not blow the ten million on that saga back when it was many more bitcoins that it would be now or maybe will be soon and who smart from failing to get in on that saga from the moment it became possible to attempt it could amount to much much more itching to be spent on the next slim chance of an edge saga. Unlimited block size just by paying pathetically low transaction fees? How many millions is that gonna cost, an edge is an edge, man, anyone want to throw money at me so I can build myself a city of datacentres in Iceland? (I'll pay 7% a day in dividends once I control the entire network! )

-MarkM-

I strongly suspect that even despite Moore's Law being thought by some to be running out, allowing an increase in the block size would not be able to be limited to increasing it only by 50% at first then another 50% each calendar year thereafter.

Some folk are already talking about 100 megabyte blocks as if maybe that might even be the smallest block size they consider changing the size at all should change it to right away, and since those same folk seem to argue it is exponentially increasing need that drives them to that number maybe we can expect 100 times the size per year thereafter too maybe.

It is ridiculously easy to spin off as many chains as their are fiat currencies, to proviide a cryptocurrency landscape as rich and possibly as varied as the fiat landscape everyone is already used to, and with Ripple transparent automatic exchanges as part of transfers should be even easier than it will be with the fiat currencies.

But hey lets give it a try: all in favour of a 50% increase in block size to start with, followed by further 50% increases yearly thereafter?

Edit: Oops misremembered the actual Moores law numbers typically cited. Maybe all in favour of doubling the size then every year and a half doubling it again is more palatable?

-MarkM-

So that particular calculation for automatically "adapting" is simply an example of why I am doubtful that automation is the way to go, since basically all it amounts to is carte blanche for all miners who want mining to be limited to a privileged elite to simply spout the biggest blocks permitted, constantly, thus automatically driving up the size permitted, letting them spout out even bigger blocks and so on as fast as possible until the few of them left are able to totally control the whole system in a nice little cartel or oligarchy or plutarchy or kakistrocracy or whatever the term is for such arrangements. (Sounds like an invitation to kakistocracy actually, maybe?)

Basically automatic "adaptation" seems more like automatic aquiescence to whatever the cartel wants, possibly happening along the way to leave them with incentives to maintain appearances of controlling less of the network than they actually do so that if/when they do achieve an actual monopoly it will appear to the public as maybe pretty much any number of "actors" the monopoly chooses to represent itself as for public relations purposes. (To prevent panics caused by fears that someone controls 51%, for example.)

-MarkM-

Yodaisms you are wanting? Simple it is: there is no like, just look.

-MarkM-

Yeah maybe we should also do polls in deepest darkest Africa, both of groups of peasants who have not managed to afford a community phone yet and of groups of the individuals who have managed to afford a phone thus are able to go into the "letting someone use my phone briefly for a fee" business, and see whether they feel something requiring the vast expense of a 24/7 internet connected 386 to 586 grade machine to get into seems a better or worse grassroots empower the people thing than something that even the latest and greatest throwaways being handed out at furniture banks cannot handle?

Sample bias much?

-MarkM-

Thank you. I was seeing stills, taken with "real cameras", I hardly ever saw any web-cam stills that weren't rather small like the ones on the model's page. So by the sound of it the effect is simply what webcam pictures look like when shown at this larger size.

(I never was a paying customer, so I only ever saw live feeds for like five or fifteen minutes or whatever that they gave out free passes for to new affiliates so the affiliate could see what they would be selling. That was way back in early days when they did it with tricks like streaming endless animated gifs, or maybe the very first deployments of actual streaming of some kind.)

-MarkM-

We won't even need a new hard fork, since everyone and their descendants will have centuries or millenia in which move their coins to another chain if they come to feel that the primary chain no longer serves their need.

Indeed they can pre-emptively start securing positions in additional chains before the time their own predicted doomsday-of-blocksize actually hits.

We might find that several merged mined chains that think they have not been getting enough attention will be eager to double their maximum block size and have so few current users, including full nodes and miners,  that doing so will be easy to get consensus on.

As already said, the primary chain is doing something right. Actually it is maybe doing several things right, maybe even in the right combinations, as so far none of the experiments in providing alternate ways of doing things secured by the same hashing-power as the primary chain have caught on even enough to actually get even half of the quantity of hashing power the primary chain has. No one is serious enough about needing larger blocks yet, it seems, to have triggered an increase of block size in response from the market, even from co-operating (merged mined) chains. Heck if it was truly massively needed / essential surely one or more of the non-cooperating chains would have done it by now and touted it as one of their "clear advantages over the primary chain / bitcoin".

-MarkM-

The *...* emphasis was basically an attempt to differentiate "will eventually someday quite likely really really seem to actually right then urgently need" from "we right now do urgently need it, we are losing adoption rate and suffering lowering exchange rates every hour or day we fail to get a higher limit into use".

Yes the apparent/seeming "need" will tend to tend upwards.

But, constantly pulling the rug out from under infrastructure development that also will tend to seem more and more "needed" in a basically fundamentally doomed attempt to turn the world's highest difficulty currency-of-final-international-settlement into a retail payment processor so people can buy penny candy using e-currency despite no longer having pennies in the snailmail world doesn't seem a productive response.

We not only have 1 megabyte per ten minutes of international final settlement transaction space, we also have, secured by that same hashing power, several other sets of blocks (namecoin, devcoin, ixcoin, i0ccoin, groupcoin, coiledcoin, and it is easy to add more) that have already established tendencies to cater to lower-value transactions (by using lower-value coins).

So if people still feel a need to spam out to the world trivially small value transactions (which to the primary chain might mean less than a few thousand dollars worth, to the first secondary chain might mean less than a few hundred dollars worth, to the second primary chain might mean less than tens of dollars worth (at this early stage; later multiply all those figures by a power of ten from time to time as adoption proceeds)...

So plenty of space is out there for low-value transactions, and more can be added very easily and modularly (add another chain, add another chain, all the time each chain remaining fully and easily within the capabilities of a single home computer on a home internet connection to fully verify).

-MarkM-

Stitch in time is one thing, building in an always-on knitting-machine on full auto is quite another.

-MarkM-

I tried some Googling to find a specific reference but couldn't find one; but in the large amount of reading I have done over the decades on information, probability, and entropy I am sure there was an approach to or concept of information in which the value (as in measure, quantification, quantity) of information is, exactly, the chance of an event in the absence of that information compared to the chance of that same event in the absence of that information. So if for example you only enough about me, bitcoins, and the alpaca dealer to calculate a 50% chance of the socks being sent, the value/quantity of alpaca sock delivery information required for you to calculate a 100% chance of that delivery would be precisely the missing 50%. For example when you know for sure the delivery did in fact happen, that is 100% information.

Maybe it might even be something to do with "Bayesian" information/probability calculations, I am not sure, a few quick Googles on value of information, probability value of information and such didn't find me a handy link to such a definition unfortunately.

-MarkM-

I don't think they are fake, I wondered how the images come out looking so fake despite having somehow been derived from actual photos of real live models. I wondered what kind of pcoressing produces that effect. I saw many many thousands of adult images back in the day and even glamour ones using some kind of soft-focus effect didn't produce that same kind of impression, nor did ones an "optimse images for the web" tool had trimmed down in size-in-bytes.

Indeed I visited one of the model's pages and at the smaller scale of the images there they didn't jump out at me as looking so artificial. SO maybe it is just the specific two images chosen rather than being an artifact added to images by processing. (For exampole in the top image the way the hair on the left is cut off looks a bit strange and its not clear how it relates to the window or frame or whatever behind her, and the rear view image lacks expanses of fleshtone so doesn't really provide much you can look closely at to see how real her features actually look.)

-MarkM-

Wow. So lets see if I have this right. Only people who use custom hacks ever made blocks over half a meg, right now only people who don't keep up with new versions and people who use custom hacks build blocks larger than a quarter meg, a vast proportion of transactions are gamblers yelling at the world about their lack of luck, free transactions reliably get into the blockchain in large numbers every day, even paid transactions are laughably dirt-cheap, we have yet to see how much impact Ripple will have on keeping transactions off the blockchain, but we "need" to raise the size limit?

-MarkM-

Weird, those images look more like OpenSim simulations than actual real humans. Even photos reduced in resolution to put on the web used to look more realistic to me than those two above for some reason back when I worked with and for "adult sites". What is producing that effect? The cameras? Something you do in processing them for the web? Maybe even some artistic effect to deliberately make them more appealing to a niche audience that actually prefers anime or other at least slightly unreal-looking models? I am genuinely curious how it is done.

-MarkM-