Jeff and Gavin are not in the list. I had a feeling that block size limit has long become a political weapon for each faction to take control of the development process thus realize their own vision of bitcoin And this is a result when lots of money is involved  In today's society, when you are talking about a project worth $6.6 billion in an enterprise, developers has no decision making right at all. It is the biggest shareholder make decisions at board level, and technical solution is only a small part of the decision making process However in a decentralized open source project like bitcoin, there is no board, no one knows how it is going to work |
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$ -0.2 I mined them with free electricity included in rent using an outdated miner, partly as a heater, so saved some cost of heating device |
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Trusting others to provide 'proof of fraud' is still trusting others.
Still that's a lot better than current headers-only SPV design I guess I'm missing it. Seems to me that needing to trust others is needing to trust others. How is this an improvement? I think every thing about trust eventually comes from risk, if there is no risk involved then you can trust anyone There are many ways to manage risk. People still manage the risk very well in today's legacy financial system since they diversify the financial risk in different area or different country, not trusting any single entity, but multiple of them Just like a bank's opinion, trust is not always a bad thing, it can dramatically increase the efficiency. A trust-less system is always of low efficiency since you have to independently verify every piece of data from anyone For small money, I would rather just trust a service provider and do not even bother with those light nodes. A good example is localbitcoins, although they are centralized p2p exchange, but you do get lots of benefit from it over true p2p exchanges, like having human admin to resolve complex dispute or scam, and even frozen coins from a scammer, instant and fee free coin transaction between users etc... you only need to be careful to not put lots of money there. A true P2P exchange however are not consumer friendly, due to enormous amount of scammers and hackers out there |
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Does Gavin have this power??
Yes, he always had it, and he isn't using it. Anyway, it will be meaningless action. I wish he would [censor the contributors out of the Bitcoin Core repo as suggested by Rizun.] It would take about 3 minutes for a replacement (or 15) to pop up. This was already discussed before. The alert keys are also held by Gavin IIRC and they have not been removed because an abuse attempt would be stopped within minutes and Gavin would lose all credibility and become one of the most hated persons in the Bitcoin world. Peter R's suggestion just confirms what we have known all along, he's paid by someone to do this. Luckily XT is living its final days. And Gavin is paid by the US Governement. This we know for sure. Are you paid by Blockstream, too? Nope sry wrong conspiracy. Still Gavin is on a USG payroll. Peter Todd and BtcDrak have their very own shitcoin. Why do you have to get personal tho? nothing personal, just stating that Gavin is paid by the Government of the United States of America. Ah and has openly met with CIA. This is the result of complexity: When a complex solution can not be fully understood by the stakeholder, the potential risk will make people start to question the trustworthiness of the solution provider, and then it will diverge the discussion to political and personal interest behind that solution Imagine that Gavin promoted a block size increase of 0.5MB, he would not have faced such large resistance from the community. But 8MB is just too large a change that brings so many complex scenario that are not able to be understood by miners and node operators Similarly, I see the same challenge with SW solution, the stakeholders would question the political and personal interest behind SW if they could not fully understand SW |
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During the July and September spam attack, almost every block was full, but there were only a few users complained about the confirmation speed because they did not include enough fee. So the fee market is far from reaching its pain point, and people will adapt to the rising fee by reduce transaction frequency or use other solutions
And of course you can't compete with payment processors, web wallet service providers and exchanges fee wise, since they send hundreds or thousands of coins at once and can afford much larger fee. But that's exactly the point, large and frequent transactions should only be done by large actors and they are the backbone of the ecosystem. Rest of the people will be using off-chain services for daily spending, so that they can get many consumer oriented features. And every one should still be able to do low frequency high value transfer so that the long term storage security and convenience is not affected.
I think this also comes down to whether we want Bitcoin to be used as a currency directly without third parties or not, I presume you do not think this is possible, I do think this is possible, which is fine. However I would argue that if it is possible being able to do both is actually better since adding more utility to Bitcoin does in turn make it a better store of value. It is Bitcoins utility that I believe even sets it apart from gold as a store of value. After all we can not sprinkle gold dust down a phone line and send it across the world cheaply in a matter of seconds without relying on third parties, we can do this with Bitcoin and I do not think that we should change this. I did sign up for the original vision of a p2p electronic cash system after all. As the chart below shows we are approaching and will exceed network capacity within a few months if this trend continues.  It is a very efficient way to use subway to do passenger transport in big cities, all the passengers must board on the same train (centralized service nodes). If all the passengers wants to drive their own car to their destination, then the total cost will be magnitudes higher than centralized service provider, and quickly becomes unfeasible when infrastructure can not handle it any more In some large cities in China they have already limited the cars that can be driven during a certain day based on its registration nr. Simply because the infrastructure can not grow exponentially following the car growth |
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Allowing the blocks to become consistently full will render transacting on the Bitcoin network more unreliable and expensive. This should not be considered a good thing this early in Bitcoins development, especially considering that adoption is tantamount to increasing the security and decentralization of the network.
Furthermore it is not just the case that we will have to be pay more for transacting, but that there will not be enough space for everyone to transact regardless of the fee that we pay. Since under such a model most average users would not be able to compete with payments processors, banks and other large institutions over block space. However I do not believe that it would even get to that point in the first place, since firstly we would fork before that happened, and secondly I do not believe such a system would gain sufficient adoption especially compared to superior alternatives that would exist concurrently in the free market.
During the July and September spam attack, almost every block was full, but there were only a few users complained about the confirmation speed because they did not include enough fee. So the fee market is far from reaching its pain point, and people will adapt to the rising fee by reduce transaction frequency or use other solutions And of course you can't compete with payment processors, web wallet service providers and exchanges fee wise, since they send hundreds or thousands of coins at once and can afford much larger fee. But that's exactly the point, large and frequent transactions should only be done by large actors and they are the backbone of the ecosystem. Rest of the people will be using off-chain services for daily spending, so that they can get many consumer oriented features. And every one should still be able to do low frequency high value transfer so that the long term storage security and convenience is not affected |
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imagine you have a pair of pants(fullnode) and in the pockets(chain) you carry receipts for all your spending..
your girlfriend(segwit) loves wearing skinny jeans hates filling her pockets up.. she now wants you to keep the transaction part of the receipt in your left pocket and the part with the shops logo of the receipt in your right pocket.. the pants still weight the same as the total paper equals the same amount but she wants you to only think about the left pocket. and although you pretend the right pocket doesnt exist, you know its still weighing you down..
I like this analogy, it is a good representation of SW: Because currently there is a limitation on size of your left pocket on this pants (1MB), and it is not easy to change the size of this pocket (Difficult to reach consensus, the pants might be too heavy etc... ), so the solution is to cut the receipts in half and put the other half in another newly made pocket (SW data) I'm still evaluating the security consequence of the new architecture on full nodes under SW. Is there a 100% sure way to prove a specific set of SW data belongs to a specific block? I think nodes still needs to go through every transaction to verify both the block and SW This is also a "kick the can down the road" approach, provide one time increase of block capacity, while made large change to bitcoin's architecture, so the question is: Is it really worth the effort comparing with simply raise the block size to 2MB? |
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Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin XT transactions will be exactly the same, and they will still be connected to each other unless a protocol level change such as changing the magic bytes happens. The only difference is the blockchain the node is using. That means that any transaction that spends pre-fork coins can and probably will be confirmed on both blockchains. And that will continue as long as none of the inputs in the transaction chain becomes tainted with any newly generated coins after the fork (which may be a little hard to do). So if a Bitcoin XT holder decides that he immediately wants to cashout his Core coins, then the transaction he sends to send his core coins to the exchange will also send his XT coins to the same address. That means he won't have access to any of his coins. To actually split it up so that there are actually two sets of coins to be spendable is a lot harder and a lot more hassle to do.
But you just need XT nodes to reject those transactions by blend in some new core coins, and I'm sure you will find a way to do that when you have million dollars worth of coins to dump I think a consensus is much easier to reach when everyone is experiencing the same problem in reality, not just some imaginary problem claimed by different devs |
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Who lost money in July 4th and 5th fork? I guess they will hate the BIP66 roll out which caused the fork, similar to they hate Gavin's 2013 fork |
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So the only thing (not precisely calculated from Poisson distribution, just an example, 10 minutes delay means the block will have a 50% chance of being orphaned)
Far from attacking your argument, I just want to share a little-known fact: - Under normal conditions, the probability than the next block arrives in less than 10 minutes is about 63%.
Thanks, take your number instead |
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I don't get it, now that I investigated and read much more about BitCoins and altcoins.
BitCoins are not secure, not private, not anonymous and to use them - you need extra effort.
Payments made through debit/credit cards are instant and most people keep their money in the bank (in fact, most workplaces choose to pay money only to your bank account now). That said, to use Bitcoin you'd have to buy BitCoins, which creates extra effort. Why do that? I don't get it!
Basically you have a choice: a) just pay instantly using your debit/credit card, or b) pay using BitCoins after wasting some of your time.
I always thought BitCoin was about privacy and anonymity, but clearly it isn't (just read the news...), so that argument goes straight outta window. Other than that, I see zero advantages, and considering what I just said - far as I understand it right now - BitCoin is a completely useless idea, unless we ditch it and start using one of the truly private and anonymous coins, which isn't gonna happen and is irrelevant to this discussion anyway.
So, am I missing something? Am I misunderstanding something? What's up with BitCoins when it comes to buying stuff? The more research I do about it, the less sense it makes to use it.
I'm not posting this to get on someone's nerves, I'm posting it because I want to understand. So don't get all personal and defensive and value-oriented here, I'm looking for facts. Thanks.
I'm talking only about paying using BitCoins. E.g. buying a monitor or a book or headphones using BitCoins instead of a credit/debit card. It's not about being a merchant or selling/buying illegal stuff on .onion sites, nor is it about using altcoins.
Note by which I seek to quench one potential argument: if you buy something and want to get it at some point in your life - you have to enter your name and address.
The simple answer is: No you don't. You just need to buy and hold bitcoin, wait for its price to rise 10-100 times and sell a little bit for fiat money, then you can happily spend your fiat money with whatever debit/credit card |
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People used to describe bitcoin as digital gold, but it seems no one complains that gold can only do 0 transactions per second, and maybe average gold holder do one transaction every 10 years or more, it still worth over $1000 per ounce I believe people don't need so much transaction capacity, there are just so many ways to do transactions. However, they need a trustworthy monetary system that do not print money out of thin air, and there is none except bitcoin See this post: Why even use BitCoins?It seems new users always wondered why should they use bitcoin to do transaction, so the transaction demand will always be the least to worry |
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On Tue, Dec 8, 2015 at 6:07 AM, Wladimir J. van der Laan wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 07, 2015 at 10:02:17PM +0000, Gregory Maxwell via bitcoin-dev
wrote:
>> TL;DR: I propose we work immediately towards the segwit 4MB block
>> soft-fork which increases capacity and scalability, and recent speedups
>> and incoming relay improvements make segwit a reasonable risk. BIP9
>> and segwit will also make further improvements easier and faster to
>> deploy. We’ll continue to set the stage for non-bandwidth-increase-based
>> scaling, while building additional tools that would make bandwidth
>> increases safer long term. Further work will prepare Bitcoin for further
>> increases, which will become possible when justified, while also
providing
>> the groundwork to make them justifiable.
>
> Sounds good to me.
Better late than never, let me comment on why I believe pursuing this plan is important.
For months, the block size debate, and the apparent need for agreement on a hardfork has distracted from needed engineering work, fed the external impression that nothing is being done, and generally created a toxic environment to work in. It has affected my own productivity and health, and I do not think I am alone.
I believe that soft-fork segwit can help us out of this deadlock and get us going again. It does not require the pervasive assumption that the entire world will simultaneously switch to new consensus rules like a hardfork does, while at the same time:
* Give a short-term capacity bump
* Show the world that scalability is being worked on
* Actually improve scalability (as opposed to just scale) by reducingbandwidth/storage and indirectly improving the effectiveness of systems like Lightning.
* Solve several unrelated problems at the same time (fraud proofs, script extensibility, malleability, ...).
So I'd like to ask the community that we work towards this plan, as it allows to make progress without being forced to make a possibly divisive choice for one hardfork or another yet.
--
Pieter SW does not reduce the network traffic, a full node would still need all the data it requires to verify the trade, just now these data are separated so that the block can contain more data when signatures are moved outside of the block, thus 1MB block can contain more transactions. It is just a re-organize of how data is stored in database. So this is an emergency solution to deal with the fear of full block and no hard fork block size increase But we already had full blocks twice in July's attack and October's attack, and nothing serious happened. So why not let blocks become full again with real traffic and see how it looks like. I think a consensus is much easier to reach when everyone is experiencing the same problem in reality, not just some imaginary problem claimed by different devs To be able to directly use the blockchain by anyone is very important, it is this make people feel having 100% control over their money. But for how large amount is to be debated. You won't use it for cents of transaction, a waste of time. So I think there will be a minimum transaction threshold on-chain, and no such limit off-chain, so people still have options |
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Even if there is no block space limitation in software, the bandwidth limit would still limit the amount of transactions that can be included in a block
For example, if I include only 100 transactions, I can include all of them for free since they don't add too much latency. But if I include 10000 transactions then my block will be orphaned all the time.
Well, you could pay for better connectivity. If not, someone else will, and will enjoy the fee's from 10000 transactions. This situation is just a miner being priced out, which happens for other reasons already. You can not have better connectivity since you already have the best available, the bottleneck is on intercontinental internet backbone. In fact the speed between Chinese miners inside china is very fast, so the rest of the world is struggling catching up with their blocks since the connection into and out of china is miserable and they have the largest hash power This is an interesting claim, but my understanding was that mining takes long enough that the latency isn't an issue (the chance of two mining blocks at the exact same second are almost non-existent). I personally have a sub-50ms ping to EU/Asia. Try to open a couple of chinese website like youku.com or tudou.com you will understand what I mean |
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In fact, the possibility of carrying out such a soft fork to change bitcoin's architecture without being rejected by old nodes revealed a fundamental security problem for bitcoin that needs to be addressed: You can even increase the total amount of coins in a similar way, because the old nodes can not see new coins, only new nodes can see Soft Fork to Increase the 21M Limit?Of course the money supply limit is prohibited from being changed, but there could be other changes which users do not fully understand its dangerous potential today. Now I understand why Satoshi said it will either worth nothing or a lot, there are just so many uncertainties on the road ahead which can wipe out this ecosystem altogether overnight But this is bad, bitcoin is trust-less since all the trust is placed on this network and mathematics. I think at least we should make a system that is trust-backward-compatible, e.g. any aspects that affects trust should continuously strengthen the trust, not weaken it For example, the changes I think are trust-backward-compatible: Any change that increase the security of the system; Any change that increase the mining decentralization (encourage more and more private miners, p2pool for example); Any change that increase the communication and understanding of different actors in the ecosystem |
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Will the value of bitcoin go up because of halving to mining reward or will this cause a crash?
Halving have the same effect of a difficulty jump by 50%, and we already had that recently, so it is not a big event worth notice |
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If only the exchanges changed to use XT (or whatever other client that implements a fork), then they would be losing business because few other users are also using XT so they don't make any money. If the users and exchanges were switched to XT and pushing for a for, then the miners would follow because that is where the money is. If miners and exchanges switch but users don't, then those miners and exchanges are incentivised to switch back because there is no money to be made if no one else is using that fork. In all of those cases, it is not possible for one group to coerce everyone else to switch, there has to be two out of three to do so otherwise there is no incentive for the other groups to switch.
Usually large mining pools have close relationship to exchanges, since they have plenty of liquidity to provide, so I guess they are more or less aligned. Average user however do not really have a choice in where bitcoin is going. So I think the concern of "the group of 12" manipulating bitcoin is real Users are attracted by bitcoin's several properties: 1. Honest money creation and limited money supply, so its value will always go up long term against fiat money 2. Secure and censorship resistant, a safe medium for storage and transfer of value 3. Fast world wide transaction When they face a change enforced by miners and exchanges, they have to decide the priority and evaluate what kind of feature they can sacrifice without totally giving up on bitcoin Statistics showing that majority of people come to bitcoin because of 1 and 2. So any change impacting these property will heavily affect user adoption and drive new users away. 3 are less important. Why no one is too worried about 50% attack? Because 50% attack only affect the payment function of the system, coins in cold storage are not affected. Even chinese government took over all the chinese mining pools, they can't rob other people's coin Currently there is a trend of advertising bitcoin as a fast and cheap payment method. However, if the new users you gained are just interested in fast and cheap transaction, then you will not have customer loyalty. Once more and more free and instant payment services appear, these customer will easily move away. Besides, this advertisement trend feels like finding innocent new users and dump the coins to them, this is not going to last long and hurt public image of bitcoin Also, in your example, with such a fork, there is nothing that distinguishes a Core transaction from an XT transaction, so those XT holders who are sending core coins to that exchange are also sending their XT coins to that exchange. What you described is simply not possible.
After the fork the blocks on XT network will not be known to core network, vice versa, just like litecoin network is not aware of any bitcoin transactions since you are running different software You brought a very interesting point: If XT somehow can destroy the corresponding coin when a pre-fork coin is spent on core chain, then we can eliminate this kind of dangerous attack. But nothing can enforce XT to do this, I guess that is not in the interest of XT, since they might want to destroy the competitor chain to make sure their success |
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How many bitcoin players are Required To have consensus? 3 miners, 4 exchange (or wallet) and 5 programmers? If 1,000 of us , running full node , complain , we will be heard?
Case the group of 12 (3 miner, 4 exhange and 5 developer) had accepted the XT , the thousands of claims against would have been heard?
Yes they would have been heard. The thousands of miners who mine at those 3 pools who are against XT (or any other proposed fork) switch to other pools who does not support the fork. Those 3 pools no longer have a majority The thousands of users (including the miners) who don't support the fork stop using those 4 exchanges and use other less popular but just as good exchanges. The thousands of users who use those 5 developer's client switch to another client. With all of the options out there, people aren't being forced to use anything, and if they don't like it, then they don't have to use those products or services which use rules they don't like. This is consensus. I'm afraid that thousands of users do not have this degree of freedom. What you said is true at the early stage of bitcoin when bitcoin was still in design phase and worth only a little. At this stage, everyone have invested so much money, effort and time into this ecosystem, thus their economy interest will limit their choice Imagine that majority of exchanges have upgraded to XT and one exchange left running core, and a fork happened. Then core exchange will immediately be flooded by millions of pre-fork coins sell order coming from XT coins holder. The value of core coin will crash to 0 right away. And then there is no meaning in mining this coin, all hash power will leave This means, if any fork happens without reaching major consensus, it is suicide economically. It does not matter how great your view is for the future or how good your design can scale, nothing matters when the market cap of that coin is 0 People have no choice because they don't want to lose money. Only new users won't lose money because of the change to a new fork, all the existing users (especially full nodes) will refuse a fork without major consensus, due to the potential loss it can incur as described above So, if no major consensus can be reached upon block size limit, bitcoin will stay at its current form until one day a major consensus is forming. This could be that thousands of transactions queuing up in the mempool and many users start to experience significant delay of confirmation. Currently all these negative things are not happening, that's the reason people are not eager to up the limit. And by keeping the blocksize at 1MB, eventually a fee market will form. And it is interesting to see if this market can solve some of the capacity problem. So instead of trying to avoid such a fee event, seeing how this fee market will develop is more interesting, because no one knows how people will adapt to this kind of new situation |
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if printing dollar is that easy, i thought there will be no more people going to sell stuff
Printing dollar is much easier than you would imagined. FED just printed several trillion dollars and no one feel something is wrong, simply because they keep all the printed money in their closet, to be used at a later time when people's focus are not on them anymore |
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Only Those Who invested a lot of money is what important, others can scream have been ignored. I was sad, but It's always been like that and this will always be so.
Right, only those who actively use Bitcoin and don't just hodl. They are the people who actively participate in the economy and they are the ones that can exert influence. It has always been like this and always will be, as that is how every economy works. Everything depends on the users, those actually spending. Businesses will accept what people are using, exchanges will accept what people are using, and so will miners because then they can use what they are mining. Those who have a lot of Bitcoin and just hodl don't have any control. They can't do anything because they aren't actually participating in the economy, so they have little influence. This is not how economy works, economy is all about power, politics and illusions Those who have lots of bitcoin and just hodl have the biggest influence to this ecosystem. Because if bitcoin have no value, then it is no use for anybody. And large capitals can greatly affect its value, both on exchanges and mining infrastructure Remember Satoshi's 1 million coins? I think those coins functions as a nuclear weapon against a malicious fork by a group of people, if that fork gains momentum and is not in the vision of Satoshi, he will dump all those coins on that fork's exchange and send its value to 0, thus kill it. Of course nothing preventing people from using that fork and slowly build up its value again after the crash. But capital will only chase the coin with the highest market capital (this is also why Ethereum will never get close to bitcoin's market cap) It is the capital maintain bitcoin's value and its infrastructure, not the end user, and they own mining farms and exchanges, basically have control over where bitcoin is going Being user oriented is a wrong mindset, because money is all about power, how to manage power is totally another area of study You can imagine, large capitals are more concerned about the security and integrity of the system instead of transaction fee, because they can afford very high transaction fee, that's why BIP 101 did not receive enough support |
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