ASICs are usually orders-of-magnitude more efficient at preordained computation, thus they will probably always be able to use a smaller cache than is used by the memory-hard CPU algorithm.
This sort of general statement is too broad to be useful. Most of the work being done in cryptonight is already done by dedicated hardware (AES round or 64x64 multiply), which is very different from the experience with SHA256 or Scrypt, where the CPU implementation of the hashes uses many simple ALU operations. The inner loop of cryptonight is about a dozen instructions. By contrast SHA256 is roughly 3375 basic integer operations. That's a huge difference in kind. I can't speak to Scrypt as I haven't studied it at all. Scrypt uses the very efficient Salsa (ChaCha is nearly identical) one-way hash from Bernstein (not SHA256) which has a very low count of ALU operations. Afaik, Litecoin (which uses Scrypt) has ASICs which I assume have displaced CPU and GPU mining. I haven't been following Litecoin since the ASICs were rumored to be released. Even if you are using dedicated hardware, to some extent it must be diluting the benefit of doing so by accessing them through generalized pipelines, 3 levels of caches (L1, L2, L3), and all the glue logic to make all those parts of the CPU work for the general purpose use case of the CPU. It is very unlikely that you've been able to isolate such that you are only activating the same number of transistors that the ASIC would for the specialized silicon. Thus I think the general statement is not too broad, but rather apropos until someone can convince me otherwise. For example, in the case of AES ASICs that exist, they are not orders of magnitude faster than the in-CPU implementation and likely also aren't orders-of-magnitude better in terms of power-efficiency either (though the latter numbers are harder to come by and harder to even estimate in the case of the in-CPU implementation). Intel reports 4.52 cycles per byte single threaded, which at 2 GHz clock comes to roughly 3.5 gigabits per second. That's in line with reported commercial AES ASICs such as the Helios FAST core (3 Gbps). Their Giga core is one order of magnitude faster (40 Gbps), but carries a heavy penalty in latency and gate count (sounds like extremely heavily pipelined to me, though that could conceivably be okay for mining). Well yeah I've cited the similar references in my work. That is why I went with AES-NI for my CPU proof-of-work hash. And why did I not access caches, instead keep a tight loop that can be loaded once in microcode and not reengage the pipeline logic over and over, and try to minimize the number of other transistors I would be activating in the CPU. One can assume the CPU will highly optimized for doing encryption since OS's offer full disk encryption. Afaics, complexity of Cryptonite's bag-O-all-tricks (AES-NI, 64x64, Scrypt-like cache latency) makes that less likely that extra generalized logic in the CPU won't be accessed, e.g. checking if a cache hit is in L1 and L2 before accessing L3 which an ASIC would not need to do. But from that one order of magnitude you have to subtract the added costs of the more complex table lookup.
Not even that. Just run the ASIC with a full size cache but eliminate L1 and L2 and other generalized logic that is consuming electricity. Intel is working hard at improving the parts of the CPU that are powered down when not in use, but it is still not very fine grained and will never be the equivalent of just specializing all the logic in an ASIC. We try to minimize the advantage the ASIC will have, but we can not be at parity with the ASIC. This is not to say that no TMTO is potentially possible but the assumption of orders-of-magnitude gains on the T side with which to make that tradeoff is questionable at best (and remember this doesn't get you to no memory, only to less memory). But as you say earlier in your post, the feasibility and efficiency payoff of this depends very much on the numbers. It is certainly possible that the most efficient way to implement any particular algorithm is with a simple lookup table, even if such a table is not strictly required.
I think perhaps you are missing my point and perhaps because it had to be deduced from what I wrote in the prior post, i.e. I didn't state it explicitly. In order to make it so it is not economical for the ASIC to convert the latency bound to compute bound, you end up making your "memory-hard" hash compute bound in the first place! That was a major epiphany. Thus why waste the time pretending the memory-hard complexity is helping you. If anything it is likely hurting you. Just go directly to using AES-NI for the hash. Which is what I did in spades. I remain fairly unconvinced that cryptonight necessarily can't use the latency bound of a lookup table access (which is largely an irreducible quantity) and the inherent cost of such a table along with the significant costs of reducing it to limit the payoff from highly-parallel dedicated implementations. But that doesn't mean that it can either.
If you are not doing the algorithm with serialized random access the way I described it as an improvement over Scrypt, then yes parallelism can eat your lunch. And if you do it the way I described, then you end up making it compute bound in order to prevent an ASIC from making it compute bound. So no matter which way you go, you are going to be compute bound. I understand your comments about associative caches vs a simple lookup table but it still isn't at all clear that large gains are possible. It seems most of the latency of larger caches just comes from them being larger. But then this too remains to be seen.
Afair, I believe my concern was on the extra transistors that are being activated with the ASIC won't need to. Again remember I am loading this from memory not even having looked at my old work today. Don't really have time to do an exhaustive reload of prior hash work today. hash can become very slow, perhaps as slow as 10 or less hashes per second. This introduces an additional problem because the pool will expend nearly as much resources verifying mine share hashes as the miner will expend producing them Believe it or not we saw one brain-dead, or more likely deliberate scam, attempt that had 0.1 (!) hashes/sec! And there was MemoryCoin with afair an 8MB memory hard hash and with upwards of 1 second per hash. But in any case the pool expending more resources will never happen, regardless of the hash rate. In order to produce a valid share you have to hash many invalid ones, but only the valid share is sent to the pool.
I am talking about the ratio. If the pool is doing 1/1000th of the work of the share miners, then the pool has to maybe charge a larger fee. Any way that wasn't my major point. I am just pointing out that there is limit to how large you can make the memory cache and thus how slow the hash function. The bigger problem with super-slow hashes is verification by the network. Despite some early concerns (I guess maybe before the implementation was un-deoptimized), cryptonight doesn't seem too bad; it only requires about 20ms, which is roughly in line with how long it might take to physically deliver a block over the network. Networks vary of course. Two nodes in the same data center will be much faster than that. Across the world it might take longer even if the block is empty.
Also theoretically the relative slowness of the hash verification could become a more severe problem in some imagined consensus network designs which attempted to eliminate pools and record all mining shares directly to the block chain. |
|
|
|
I mean it's obvious, but looks like it's only me who understands basic logic, reason, and scientific method.
Its always obvious to the Dunning-Kruger confidence. i`m out of this thread, looks like i cannot reason with people here
Thank you God. You indeed work miracles. Let me tell you the real problem.
You said you were leaving  Earlier you said the real problem is low IQ people. Now you say it is centralization. So if only high IQ run the world, then centralization is the only possible outcome. So why are you bothering to even talk about what can't be fixed in terms of your logical basis. That should give you a strong hint that your logical basis is flawed. Scientific method is something you appear to not understand well. You quote a correlation between IQ and personal income. First of all, you should learn that correlation doesn't imbue causality, i.e. there can be other factors which may be at play and the correlation may not hold in every scenario past, future, and circumstantially. Secondly, if low IQ people are more numerous (hey its your assertion not mine!) then mathematically a higher number of lower income people can potentially have more economic impact thant a lower number of higher income people. Things like that is where you diverge from reality. And there are many, many more instances where you've run aground and apparently didn't realize it. |
|
|
|
One-standard-deviation increase in childhood general intelligence (15 IQ points)
decreases women’s odds of parenthood by 21–25%... dysgenic fertility among women is
predicted to lead to a decline in the average intelligence of the population ... In regards to dysgenic fertility in high IQ women I believe this will also prove to be a transient phenomena. Right now we are living through perhaps the most profound shift in natural selective pressure since the development of agriculture 8000+ years ago. In 1960 the birth control pill was approved by the FDA. Since that time women who wish to control their fertility do so and women who do not desire children do not have children. This is unprecedented in human history and represents a profound shift in selective pressure from males to females. We have decoupled sex from reproduction and in doing so have displaced male success at sexual relations as the primary driver of human evolution. Today the primary driver of human reproduction is the desire of women to have children. A substantial portion of the female population is not adapted to the new environment and are in the process of selecting themselves partially or completely out of the gene pool. After a few generations this will leave us with a population that prioritize children and I believe that the trend towards dysgenic fertility will dissipate. High IQ men that mate with average IQ women, often produce high IQ offspring so it doesn't really matter if the high IQ women select themselves out of the gene pool. The men drive evolution. That is why we feel the urge to impregnate many women. I read that most men in certain parts of Asia have Genghis Khan's genes. If the State wasn't dictating to men that they have to give up an arm and a leg for each child they produce, men would be much more reproductive. Sometimes I feel I haven't done my duty to plant more children (only 2 thus far that I know of), but seeing the outcome with the first two has put a brake on my enthusiasm about planting more. |
|
|
|
|
I am trying to recall and regenerate some of my thought processes from my 2013 research about memory-hard hash function designs.
The basic idea of Scrypt is to one-way hash a value and write the hash output to a memory location, hash that output write the hash output to the next memory location, and repeat until all the memory you want to use is written. Then random access read from memory locations using the value read to determine the next memory location to read. It is hoped that your algorithm becomes random access latency bound. However the problem is a GPU or ASIC can trade computation for memory size by only storing every Nth hash output and then calculating on the fly the other hash values as they are accessed. So then the algorithm becomes more compute bound than latency bound. However that doesn't necessarily mean hashes/watt is superior with the compute bound version of the algorithm. It depends on the relative power inefficiencies of the smaller memory versus the increased computation. Also if hashes/capital cost is a factor in the return on investment, then hashrate versus cost of the silicon hardware for two algorithms has to be compared and noting that smaller caches typically have nearly an order-of-magnitude lower random access latencies.
I suppose the ASICs and GPUs mining Litecoin proved that the factors favored the compute bound algorithm, at least for the Scrypt parameters Litecoin uses.
The next attempt at an improvement over Scrypt was (which I wrote down in 2013 well before the Cryptonite proof-of-work hash was published) was to not just read pseudo-randomly as described above, but to write new pseudo-random values to each pseudo-randomly accessed location. This defeats storing only every Nth random access location. However it is still possible to trade latency for computation by only storing the location that was accessed to compute the value to store instead of storing the entire value. The compute bound version of the algorithm can not be defeated by reading numerous locations before storing a value because the starting seed need only be stored.
Thus I concluded it is always possible to trade computation for latency in any memory-hard hash function.
ASICs are usually orders-of-magnitude more efficient at preordained computation, thus they will probably always be able to use a smaller cache than is used by the memory-hard CPU algorithm.
Even if the ASIC did not trade more computation for less latency, the CPU will be using more electricity to do the computational parts of the latency bound algorithm such as the one-way hash functions or how ever the data is manipulated before each write to make it pseudo-random. Even though the CPU can mask the time required to do this computation by running two threads per cache thus doing computation during the latency of the cache accesses of the partner thread, the CPU can not make the electricity cost of the computation disappear. And the ASIC are usually orders-of-magnitude more efficient at preordained computation, because the CPU has all this general computation logic such as generalized pipelines, the L1 and L2 caches (with their 8-way set associativity overhead!), and lots of other transistors that are not off when not being used.
Thus as per Litecoin's experience, I do not expect any derivative of a memory-hard hash function, including Cryptonite, to be immune from radical speedups and efficiency improvenments due to well designed ASICs. This of course won't happen until a Cryptonite coin has a very large market cap.
There is another issue. Using large caches such as 1 or 2MB and smaller data words, e.g. 256-bit hashes, and then the large number of random access reads and writes necessary to attempt to defeat compute bound algorithms, means the hash can become very slow, perhaps as slow as 10 or less hashes per second. This introduces an additional problem because the pool will expend nearly as much resources verifying mining share hashes as the miner will expend producing them. In 2013, I had attempted to resolve this side issue by successfully designing a 4096-bit hash based on the concepts of Bernstein's ChaCha hash. Any way, I abandoned it all because of the bolded statement above.
|
|
|
|
BTC flawed 'cause 51% attack? He didn't say anything we didn't already know...
I didn't think Snowden's thoughts on bitcoin were entirely that bad, and agree that it regarded nothing that most people haven't already accepted ie possibility of 51% etc etc. A 51% attack can create as many Bitcoins as it wants to. I think Bitcoin investors do not really believe it can happen, because they would not invest in inflatacoin. But it is much more likely than they believe. Everyone knows that Bitcoin mining MUST become more centralized (in order to scale up transactions) and thus it will likely (almost certainly IMO) eventually become controlled by the G20 that can regulate a few 100s of mining nodes. Will be justified by the G20 doing coordination against terrorism, money laundering, and tax cheating. And the masses who use Coinbase wallets and other large providers such as the Blockstream.com (3 million wallets) CEO shaking hands with the Prime Minister of the UK upthread, won't care! They are sheep. They follow. They are preoccupied. |
|
|
|
And last but certainly not least, sue your mother and fuck her too, because she brought your dumb ass into this world.  (that is if you think you should abrogate your responsibility and sue anyone for the market price movements of BTC) |
|
|
|
So we had Satoshi on Aug 15 and now Snowden chimes that Bitcoin needs to be fixed: I'm not sure if Snowden particularly knows what he's talking about in this case really. I mean, the 51% attack is hardly something most don't know about. http://cointelegraph.com/news/115133/edward-snowden-on-bitcoin-bitcoin-by-itself-is-flawed“Obviously, Bitcoin by itself is flawed. The protocol has a lot of weaknesses and transaction sides and a lot of weaknesses that structurally make it vulnerable to people who are trying to own 50 percent of the network and so on and so forth.” ' Despite his concern for the digital currency, Snowden believes the concept of tokenization and proof of work could be implemented to create “some very interesting things,”...” |
|
|
|
But past happenings do not guarantee future happenings... You may have been right once, twice or even more times, but this does not mean you will be right this time..  I've always been correct on BTC price in terms of the major moves. I was even correct in early 2013 when at $10 I gave my thumbs up to going all in. |
|
|
|
But past happenings do not guarantee future happenings... You may have been right once, twice or even more times, but this does not mean you will be right this time.. I've always been correct on BTC price in terms of the major moves. I was even correct in early 2013 when at $10 I gave my thumbs up to going all in. |
|
|
|
....in cypherdoc's thread... attract those thinkers.
The thinkers long since left that noise chamber. The guys who remained have nothing better to do but waste their time. The entire issue is going to become mute, because there is technology to solve the damn problem. Block size will never be an issue again. Fools will waste their life discussing something which is soon to be an outdated non-issue. While you all were busy circle jerking, I was solving the problem. P.S. I am not cheering the censoring of cyperdorc's thread, but none of these threads about XT hidden inside a lying topic name (Gold collapsing, Bitcoin UP) should be in the Economics -> Speculation subforum. They belong in a Bitcoin Discussion -> Speculation subforum or better in the Altcoin Discussion forum. I can't understand why the moderators were so derelict in their duties for such a long time. But locking cyperdorc's thread is inappropriate. Come on theymos, move these threads instead. |
|
|
|
Hard forks are 51% attacks, we need side-chains
 If that's your new twist I'm gonna have to get on board with you. It is just a way of clarifying what I've been thinking and working on for the past 3 - 4 months. |
|
|
|
Hard forks are 51% attacks, we need side-chainsTo get some perspective on the logic I want to promote, first read theymos's Reddit sticky post (he is the moderator or r/bitcoin and also one of the owners of Bitcointalk.org): https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3h9cq4/its_time_for_a_break_about_the_recent_mess/You can also read the very respected Bitcoin research Meni Rosenfeld's comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3h9cq4/its_time_for_a_break_about_the_recent_mess/cu6udfeI also note this hostile new "feature" (a.k.a. trojan horse) in Bitcoin XT (a.k.a. GavinCoin): https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1156489.0But let me attempt to remove my subjective opinion from the objective logic I want to present. A hard fork if it succeeds is a majority attack against the minority. Thus it is technically a 51% attack where the adversary that has greater than 50% of the hashrate can always win the longest chain of proof-of-work and thus can dictate to the minority (that is unless the minority can distinguish which blocks are being produced by the adversary and decide to never mine on them, thus maintaining their minority hashrate chain as distinct). For example, afaics the change to Bitcoin XT to blacklist the Tor exit node IP addresses does not make the blocks produced by Bitcoin XT miners distinguishable from those blocks mined by those running Bitcoin Core full nodes. Of course once Bitcoin XT nodes begin producing blocks greater than 1 MB in size, these blocks would be distinguished as not being produced by Bitcoin Core miners. However, note that one of the characteristics of a 51% attack is that it can indeed change the protocol. Of course the minority can refuse to mine on the new protocol, but given that network hashrate is so crucial for security in Bitcoin's design, it is doubtful that a minority block chain could survive because the network hashrate of the majority (especially a significant majority) could be diverted to execute large double-spends on the minority chain wrecking havoc. Just the threat of that possibility is probably enough to cause significant HODLers to sell their coins on the minority fork causing it's price to diverge downwards. Thus, network hashrate political wars are attempts to make 51% attacks. They are adversarial. All of this could be avoided with two improvements to crypto-currency technology: - Side-chains so HODLers can move their Bitcoin value to the protocol of their choice.
- A way to filter 51% attacks, so that network hashrate is not a weapon of mass destruction, and so the principle of side-chains can work correctly.
Blockstream is implementing the first improvement. I am implementing the second improvement. Note there are some issues with side-chains that have to be dealt with carefully. The movement of coins between chains needs to have long lock up times to insure that reorganizations due to orphaned chains can't create a chaotic mixed up outcome (namely duplicate copies of coins) that can't be restored. Speculators can help users move their coins faster between chains for a fee which covers their opportunity cost and risks in the lock up. It is time we put an end to this nonsense, by using technology to do so. P.S. note I am formerly the username AnonyMint (and numerous usernames hence), which I abandoned last year to try to encourage myself to stop wasting so much time posting in forums. When I first joined this forum as AnonyMint in Spring 2013, I wrote an article "Bitcoin : The Digital Kill Switch" which Google will confirm to you was published around the web a bit. My real name is on that article.
Hope everyone has collected their free money... Well in May I wrote in several Economics -> Speculation threads that BTC would rise from the low $200s to $315, then it would crash back down to eventually below $150 (and probably to double-digits) no later than sometime after October.
I reiterated these points over the past weeks in the Economics -> Speculation -> PnF and Economics -> Speculation -> Free Money threads. Even a few hours before the crash I reiterated these points again that everyone should have been short since $315.
The bottom in the BTC price will come in Spring 2016, and it will be back below $100, perhaps even below $50.
After that, we will start a new bull market that will make investors rich.
If you weren't dumb, you'd learn to stop ignoring me. You'd be clicking my Profile and reading all my archive of posts.
But you are dumb and lazy, so you won't do that. And so you will remain ignorant. And I sort of like that, don't you?
|
|
|
|
PS: I've decided to risk a portion of my BTCs following the advice you gave on Klee's thread. As stated there, I don't feel comfortable about it, but more and more I am convinced that your approach of BTC's is essentially a "gold-like" commodity and should be treated like one, is true.  As more people capitulate to the reality that it is better to be short than long that is what drives the extreme low. This bounce back up is one more gift to go short before it is too late. Again the "Only the Date is Unknown". I don't know how far up the price will reach before crashing again or the timing. Volatility will increase. The "End of Government" can mean many things. It can mean we still have governments exerting totalitarianism with the chaos of loss of rule of law (i.e. rampant corruption in government). Again study my upthread review of the decades long chaotic collapse of the Western Roman empire. The government won't entirely disappear any time soon. You'll wish they would. In Rome it got so bad that the people just abandoned their land because the government was so oppressive. Later there was no government in Rome and only cows grazing in the city. But first the totalitarianism. |
|
|
|
PS: I've decided to risk a portion of my BTCs following the advice you gave on Klee's thread. As stated there, I don't feel comfortable about it, but more and more I am convinced that your approach of BTC's is essentially a "gold-like" commodity and should be treated like one, is true. As more people capitulate to the reality that it is better to be short than long that is what drives the extreme low. This bounce back up is one more gift to go short before it is too late. Again the "Only the Date is Unknown". I don't know how far up the price will reach before crashing again or the timing. Volatility will increase. The "End of Government" can mean many things. It can mean we still have governments exerting totalitarianism with the chaos of loss of rule of law (i.e. rampant corruption in government). Again study my upthread review of the decades long chaotic collapse of the Western Roman empire. The government won't entirely disappear any time soon. You'll wish they would. In Rome it got so bad that the people just abandoned their land because the government was so oppressive. Later there was no government in Rome and only cows grazing in the city. But first the totalitarianism. |
|
|
|
Hard forks are 51% attacks, we need side-chainsTo get some perspective on the logic I want to promote, first read theymos's Reddit sticky post (he is the moderator or r/bitcoin and also one of the owners of Bitcointalk.org): https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3h9cq4/its_time_for_a_break_about_the_recent_mess/You can also read the very respected Bitcoin research Meni Rosenfeld's comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3h9cq4/its_time_for_a_break_about_the_recent_mess/cu6udfeI also note this hostile new "feature" (a.k.a. trojan horse) in Bitcoin XT (a.k.a. GavinCoin): https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1156489.0But let me attempt to remove my subjective opinion from the objective logic I want to present. A hard fork if it succeeds is a majority attack against the minority. Thus it is technically a 51% attack where the adversary that has greater than 50% of the hashrate can always win the longest chain of proof-of-work and thus can dictate to the minority (that is unless the minority can distinguish which blocks are being produced by the adversary and decide to never mine on them, thus maintaining their minority hashrate chain as distinct). For example, afaics the change to Bitcoin XT to blacklist the Tor exit node IP addresses does not make the blocks produced by Bitcoin XT miners distinguishable from those blocks mined by those running Bitcoin Core full nodes. Of course once Bitcoin XT nodes begin producing blocks greater than 1 MB in size, these blocks would be distinguished as not being produced by Bitcoin Core miners. However, note that one of the characteristics of a 51% attack is that it can indeed change the protocol. Of course the minority can refuse to mine on the new protocol, but given that network hashrate is so crucial for security in Bitcoin's design, it is doubtful that a minority block chain could survive because the network hashrate of the majority (especially a significant majority) could be diverted to execute large double-spends on the minority chain wrecking havoc. Just the threat of that possibility is probably enough to cause significant HODLers to sell their coins on the minority fork causing it's price to diverge downwards. Thus, network hashrate political wars are attempts to make 51% attacks. They are adversarial. All of this could be avoided with two improvements to crypto-currency technology: - Side-chains so HODLers can move their Bitcoin value to the protocol of their choice.
- A way to filter 51% attacks, so that network hashrate is not a weapon of mass destruction, and so the principle of side-chains can work correctly.
Blockstream is implementing the first improvement. I am implementing the second improvement. Note there are some issues with side-chains that have to be dealt with carefully. The movement of coins between chains needs to have long lock up times to insure that reorganizations due to orphaned chains can't create a chaotic mixed up outcome (namely duplicate copies of coins) that can't be restored. Speculators can help users move their coins faster between chains for a fee which covers their opportunity cost and risks in the lock up. It is time we put an end to this nonsense, by using technology to do so. P.S. note I am formerly the username AnonyMint (and numerous usernames hence), which I abandoned last year to try to encourage myself to stop wasting so much time posting in forums. When I first joined this forum as AnonyMint in Spring 2013, I wrote an article "Bitcoin : The Digital Kill Switch" which Google will confirm to you was published around the web a bit. My real name is on that article.
|
|
|
|
To get some perspective on the logic I want to promote, first read theymos's Reddit sticky post (he is the moderator or r/bitcoin and also one of the owners of Bitcointalk.org): https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3h9cq4/its_time_for_a_break_about_the_recent_mess/You can also read the very respected Bitcoin research Meni Rosenfeld's comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3h9cq4/its_time_for_a_break_about_the_recent_mess/cu6udfeI also note this hostile new "feature" (a.k.a. trojan horse) in Bitcoin XT (a.k.a. GavinCoin): https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1156489.0But let me attempt to remove my subjective opinion from the objective logic I want to present. A hard fork if it succeeds is a majority attack against the minority. Thus it is technically a 51% attack where the adversary that has greater than 50% of the hashrate can always win the longest chain of proof-of-work and thus can dictate to the minority (that is unless the minority can distinguish which blocks are being produced by the adversary and decide to never mine on them, thus maintaining their minority hashrate chain as distinct). For example, afaics the change to Bitcoin XT to blacklist the Tor exit node IP addresses does not make the blocks produced by Bitcoin XT miners distinguishable from those blocks mined by those running Bitcoin Core full nodes. Of course once Bitcoin XT nodes begin producing blocks greater than 1 MB in size, these blocks would be distinguished as not being produced by Bitcoin Core miners. However, note that one of the characteristics of a 51% attack is that it can indeed change the protocol. Of course the minority can refuse to mine on the new protocol, but given that network hashrate is so crucial for security in Bitcoin's design, it is doubtful that a minority block chain could survive because the network hashrate of the majority (especially a significant majority) could be diverted to execute large double-spends on the minority chain wrecking havoc. Just the threat of that possibility is probably enough to cause significant HODLers to sell their coins on the minority fork causing it's price to diverge downwards. Thus, network hashrate political wars are attempts to make 51% attacks. They are adversarial. All of this could be avoided with two improvements to crypto-currency technology: - Side-chains so HODLers can move their Bitcoin value to the protocol of their choice.
- A way to filter 51% attacks, so that network hashrate is not a weapon of mass destruction, and so the principle of side-chains can work correctly.
Blockstream is implementing the first improvement. I am implementing the second improvement. Note there are some issues with side-chains that have to be dealt with carefully. The movement of coins between chains needs to have long lock up times to insure that reorganizations due to orphaned chains can't create a chaotic mixed up outcome (namely duplicate copies of coins) that can't be restored. Speculators can help users move their coins faster between chains for a fee which covers their opportunity cost and risks in the lock up. It is time we put an end to this nonsense, by using technology to do so. P.S. note I am formerly the username AnonyMint (and numerous usernames hence), which I abandoned last year to try to encourage myself to stop wasting so much time posting in forums. When I first joined this forum as AnonyMint in Spring 2013, I wrote an article "Bitcoin : The Digital Kill Switch" which Google will confirm to you was published around the web a bit. My real name is on that article. |
|
|
|
Hope everyone has collected their free money... Well in May I wrote in several Economics -> Speculation threads that BTC would rise from the low $200s to $315, then it would crash back down to eventually below $150 (and probably to double-digits) no later than sometime after October.
I reiterated these points over the past weeks in the Economics -> Speculation -> PnF and Economics -> Speculation -> Free Money threads. Even a few hours before the crash I reiterated these points again that everyone should have been short since $315.
The bottom in the BTC price will come in Spring 2016, and it will be back below $100, perhaps even below $50.
After that, we will start a new bull market that will make investors rich.
If you weren't dumb, you'd learn to stop ignoring me. You'd be clicking my Profile and reading all my archive of posts.
But you are dumb and lazy, so you won't do that. And so you will remain ignorant. And I sort of like that, don't you?
PS: I've decided to risk a portion of my BTCs following the advice you gave on Klee's thread. As stated there, I don't feel comfortable about it, but more and more I am convinced that your approach of BTC's is essentially a "gold-like" commodity and should be treated like one, is true. As more people capitulate to the reality that it is better to be short than long that is what drives the extreme low. This bounce back up is one more gift to go short before it is too late. Again the "Only the Date is Unknown". I don't know how far up the price will reach before crashing again or the timing. Volatility will increase. The "End of Government" can mean many things. It can mean we still have governments exerting totalitarianism with the chaos of loss of rule of law (i.e. rampant corruption in government). Again study my upthread review of the decades long chaotic collapse of the Western Roman empire. The government won't entirely disappear any time soon. You'll wish they would. In Rome it got so bad that the people just abandoned their land because the government was so oppressive. Later there was no government in Rome and only cows grazing in the city. But first the totalitarianism. |
|
|
|
Well in May I wrote in several Economics -> Speculation threads that BTC would rise from the low $200s to $315, then it would crash back down to eventually below $150 (and probably to double-digits) no later than sometime after October.
I reiterated these points over the past weeks in the Economics -> Speculation -> PnF and Economics -> Speculation -> Free Money threads. Even a few hours before the crash I reiterated these points again that everyone should have been short since $315.
The bottom in the BTC price will come in Spring 2016, and it will be back below $100, perhaps even below $50.
After that, we will start a new bull market that will make investors rich.
If you weren't dumb, you'd learn to stop ignoring me. You'd be clicking my Profile and reading all my archive of posts.
But you are dumb and lazy, so you won't do that. And so you will remain ignorant. And I sort of like that, don't you?
|
|
|
|
|
Show Posts
