We are in the middle of an eviromental desaster, thats not mainstream you can read it in many many scientific papers.
People ignore that make big stress to our children.
We are. The onus is on the government to implement climate-friendly measures; carbon tax, or other financial disincentives to discourage certain activities (ie. Bitcoin mining). People also seem to ignore that greenwashing is very much quite a prevalent issue within the society that we live in. If governments are willing to implement drastic measures to limit the environmental impact of Bitcoin mining, either through outlawing it or by making them use cleaner energy source then there is no problem. And centralisation..... hell how can you mine BTC these days without investing thousends of dollars at a place with cheap electricity. Thats no decentralasion. Its a fairy tale BTC is still decentral. It was sathoshis idea , but he went off when grafic cards could mine Bitcoin.
PoW works, simple as that and there is nothing to change there. There is no such thing as decentralization when we're talking about PoW or PoS for that matter. Simple logic tells you that whoever has the most resources will be able to control a larger proportion of the network, and eventually it would become an entire industry where economies of scale outperform small miners. |
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Anyway, the title itself is already a big failure. Nobody should fall for it. Other than the fact that it is sent to spam, which could even be enough to outright disregard the email as trash, the bait is very clear. Why should anybody donate me Bitcoin out of the blue? I was not asking for it. I did not solicit Bitcoin donation.
If something is freely sent from the heavens above, it is most likely a scam. Beware!
It's meant to trick those that don't know any better. It's quite common to hook users up with some form of financial incentives as a bait. These are quite dumb, you should probably be more wary of spear phishing. Those are far more targeted and convincing. |
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Why would someone want to create uncompressed keys? Is there a benefit that I am missing?
No one should. It would just increase the size of their transaction unnecessary. The quote probably isn't trying to encourage to do so, but just to state that it is still possible generate sw addresses with uncompressed keys. There are services still using uncompressed keys but probably due to laziness. |
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Complete nonsense. Bitcoin is better to some because it offers much better returns; but that doesn't discount the fact that Bitcoin has far, far greater risks as opposed to insured savings with compounded interest. Those are comparably safer and has guarantees for the initial deposits, in certain cases. If you are willing to take the risks of your investments getting to zero, then by all means go ahead with Bitcoin. If you are not ready for having a volatile investment with no guarantees whatsoever of any long term gains, then people should probably stick with safer investments.
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that would be my guess but i honestly am not sure how much people making brute forcing private keys. but it's not hard. just start at 0 and work your way up to 2^256 because all bitcoin private keys fall in that range so there's no guessing. you just iterate through them and check the balance. how hard could that be? doesn't matter if they have 2fa on their wallet or not.
It is very hard. Do you know how much 2^256 is? It's quite hard for normal people to visualized, but just estimate the time it takes to hash and compare the address for any possible matches. A very abstract math: 2^256/2,000,000,000,000,000 ( (assumption) of no. of address with balance) = 5.78 x 10^61 (1) (1) / 10^20 (approx no. of hashes in the network currently -> Cannot be approximated to be the same, the ASICs for mining cannot be used for generating addresses) =5.70 x 10^40 seconds needed to find a single address that is used (2) (2) / (3.154 x 10^7) = 1.835 x 10^33 years. Math might be off by a bit but you get the idea. i get that. i don't want it to even be a possibility. not even a theoretical possibility. because the theoretical possibility existing shows that the whole setup was poorly designed. just my opinion.
you could say what about the $5 wrench attack? isn't that a theoretical possibility and isn't that a problem? yes it is but some things you have control over and some you can't and just have to react to. there's alot of things you can't control but the things you can that's the ones you have to work on.
If you cannot fully appreciate the (magnitude of) probability of the events that we've covered so far, then I'm sorry none of the cryptos are for you. Cryptography operates by the basis of probability and the improbability of the event is what makes it secure. $5 wrench attack is very practical. Finding a properly generated Bitcoin address by bruteforcing isn't. Actually I already did. It's in another posting I made a couple days ago. I'm sure you would be highly against it so if you want to flame away on that thread go for it but I'm just saying what features I want to have.
Bitcoin security is probably "just good enough" I would think. Not great but just good enough.
I really don't blindly come on the forum and flame others. I'm not qualified enough for that. If none of the cryptographers has ever criticized Bitcoin so far, then any assertions about the insecurities is probably just pure paranoia. Trust me, if we haven't thought of people attempting bruteforcing addresses or any small weaknesses within MuSig, we would've shot it down in 2009 and 2018 respectively. |
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Fair points and a very well constructed argument.
Thanks. The thing is, how do we ensure the security of a chain without wasting this much energy? I mean, if we don't care about the decentralized aspects of Bitcoin then we probably shouldn't be using it after all. So since we do care about its decentralized aspects.. how do we make this possible?
Since there's no known better technology than Bitcoin/PoW, this is simply the best we can do. There is enough time for open-source to be explored and to make Bitcoin better as time goes on. But the issue is, the Bitcoin community generally doesn't like changes. Therefore, even if we did find a better alternative to PoW, chances are it'd be instantly rejected by the crypto community.
This thing is double-edged. You have a currency that needs upgrades but upgrades mean acceptance, which this particular community doesn't agree with very well.
The simple answer is that, you don't. The very fact that people are highlighting that Bitcoin has been consuming tons of energy means that it is working. PoW is working because it is prohibitively expensive and unprofitable for an adversary to attack the chain. We don't have to change something that is working. The only thing that has to change is people's arguments towards Bitcoin's electricity wastage. Yes, Bitcoin consumes a ton of electricity, and isn't as efficient as other payment processors... But, there is a potential for it to eventually scale and serve as a substitute for the financial systems around the globe and as a universal payment processor at the same time. It simply doesn't make sense for Bitcoiners to refute the arguments by deflecting it to: 1) Other issues, ie. non-close substitutes. 2) Renewable energy; Doesn't mean zero environmental impact, doesn't mean zero e-waste, doesn't mean zero opportunity costs 3) Some ridiculous arguments which has no relation whatsoever to the issue at hand. My point is that it is simply better to embrace that Bitcoin is an inefficient currency right now. Trying to refute the said arguments with the points above just makes us look like fools and cultist. |
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#1) If you are able to identify spamming bitcoin addresses, then you punish them by placing them on a blacklist that all miners keep and share just like they share other things. An address could stay on the blacklist for an agreed upon amount of time, say 6 months or 1 year. Whatever.
#2) If you are able to identify spamming bitcoin addresses, you punish them financially. How that would be done is a good question but it would involve debiting their bitcoin balance.
As you alluded to, the idea of having to pay expensive fees served as a deterrant to spammers.
Probably answered fully by the users above; no censorship should happen on the network. Much less one that is decided through arbitrary criteria and risk affecting certain users as a collateral. I appreciate the brainstorming and the ideas that you've proposed. However, I find that it really isn't anywhere near the most pressing issues, or an issue at all for that matter that would justify additional strain on the network nodes, and being subjected to red tapes during the implementation, by the miners, mainly. Paying a fee for transactions is just fine; if users are complaining about high fees, then well too bad. Going by the proposal, then they would be waiting for hours or days to make any transaction. I'll very much rather pay $10 and get it over and done with. You'll probably run into the problem with larger botnets and specialized computing arrays offering services for the PoW as dictated in your proposal eitherways. There is no such thing as no fees. If you are going to have PoW as a substitute, then you are paying for the fees in the form of additional strain on your CPU and electrical costs. It would have to be more expensive than paying the fees as you are also putting a strain on the rest of the network, for making them validating the transaction's PoW. This will probably never happen in Bitcoin, but feel free to try it as an altcoin. |
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Funnily enough, people criticize Bitcoin's energy usage with them turning a blind eye on other "unnecessary"(not necessarily bad, but not necessarily needed for humanity to survive) energy hogs such as Christmas lights and gaming consoles.
That begs a few questions; What is the closest substitute to Christmas lights and gaming consoles? What is the electrical consumption of them? How much e-waste is produced as a result of them? What is the perceived utility of them? Is it fair to compare two completely different subjects? Shouldn't we be comparing it to the next best alternative? There is both sides to a coin. Saying Bitcoin is a blatant waste of electricity is wrong, because PoW is meant to consume large amount of resources in exchange for the security of the chain. It is, however not wrong to argue that Bitcoin is a worse choice of payment medium as compared to Visa, Mastercard, SEPA, etc in terms of efficiency. Bitcoin's TPS is probably about 7-10 TPS, avg is about 3-4TPS in these few days and I daresay there is a larger proportion of transfers between services or exchanges than actual day-to-day use. Going by that, the efficiency of Bitcoin as a currency is far lower than that of it's closest substitute, by a ton. I think Visa alone processes 1,700 TPS probably at a far lower environmental degradation to Bitcoin. The argument about Bitcoin's electricity wastage has nothing to do with the law of conservation of energy. Duh, electrical energy is primarily converted to heat energy. We're saying that there is a more efficient payment method than what we're currently having. 3TPS just doesn't cut it. |
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A few issues that I can foresee if this proposal is ever implemented. It doesn't serve as a viable disincentive against rogue actors; introducing points of failure and trusting specific miners goes against the ethos of Bitcoin. It is extremely annoying to be forking Bitcoin every time a bad actor appears and the community attempts to censor it; you need all of the clients to upgrade immediately or risk certain nodes staying on the wrong fork. Rogue actors do not care about mining fees, it would merely subsidize parts of their attack but would be fairly negligible as the price tanks after that. They would probably start mining blocks which censors specific transactions and with one of the legitimate miner's address being included in the coinbase. Your censoring would fail in this aspect as they don't care about collecting any part of the mining fees. Effective censorship requires 51% of the network participating in the said attack. Any less than that, then transactions would potentially just have their confirmations delayed and would eventually make it into a block and get confirmed. If a 51% attack does happen, then I would assume that Bitcoin doesn't really have any use. Once it gets into a block, then it could potentially taint other outputs. At some point in time, all of the outputs would be tainted in some way or another. Should miners start censoring every single transaction? No one should be dictating the core Bitcoin functions; specifically who gets to mine and who doesn't. I've never really seen any policies implemented which goes against this, perhaps it might change but I can't see it happening without major backlash. I am more curious on if "is this something we need ?"
i.e. is the potential threat worth introducing such a feature or is the threat exaggerated?
Does such countermeasure create massive fractures in the community that it's simply not worth it?
IMO, no. Exploring the benefit/cost of an attack like this instead of trying to "attempt" and albeit fairly ineffectively fix the problem would result in far more pressing issues to solve. Is a more elegant way simply to block peer IP/tor ID, to choke a miner's mempool?
No. |
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Additionally, as reducing blocktime the number of orphan blocks increases, more energy is wasted.
When 2 miners find the nonce and mine the block nearly at the same time one of these blocks become orphan. All energy spent in the orphan block is literally wasted.
As energy consumption is a hot topic today, one more reason to keep block time at 10 minutes to minimize orphan blocks
Same goes for increasing the block size. However, you have to include certain trade-offs with your choices. It is quite inevitable for the stale rates to increase(?) given any changes in those parameters. Time taken for validation of blocks should be a second, max and the propagation delay should be very insignificant as well. The stales should only increase (to an appreciable extent) if the miners are not interconnected well enough, or if blocks are always mined before the majority of the miners received and validates the transaction. It simply doesn't make sense for us to stagnate the current parameters, because Bitcoin simply won't scale, on-chain that is. Orphan rate isn't an issue by the way, orphans and stales are different. |
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What I meant was the average user is not going to know anything about the mempool (or how to even access it). So how do they know what fee they should set? Well if we put ourselves in their shoes, they can set a really really low fee. 30 minutes later it's still not filled. They'll increase it slightly. 20 minutes later still not filled. It becomes like guess work which is not ideal. And what's more confusing is, well maybe 0.0005 btc may be filled quickly today but tomorrow it won't and without knowledge of mempool (or how to even access it), they're back at square one at trying to guess the correct fee or risk overpaying.
This doesn't seem like something that would encourage mass adoption from the average user.
Then unfortunately there is nothing to improve on. Most wallet have an implementation of floating fees, where the wallet is able to suggest the optimal fee rates, based on the desired confirmation timeframe given by the user. The algorithm might not be the most accurate in predicting the actual fees required but is accurate enough such that you won't overpay too much and still get an almost guaranteed confirmation within the timeframe specified. Some wallets also gives the user a rough estimation of the mempool to help them estimate the optimal fee rates to use. |
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Where did you get the 1/3 from?
Yeah, what is this about? @ranochigo
I can't find the exact research which concluded this. I think I reached the conclusion after reading this quite a while ago. https://nakamotoinstitute.org/static/docs/on-stake-and-consensus.pdfAfter thinking about it, I realized that selfish mining also results in 1/3 of the network tolerance for Bitcoin. |
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It could also be because said exchanges haven't designed an internal mechanism to adjust the fee of a user's transaction in the first place and just assigned a static constant for everybody regardless of network conditions.
Tracking the fee market and the fee rate is quite a simple thing to do and helps their user offset the costs of their transaction as well. I'm almost certain that it is done for more profits and to a certain extent, helping the exchange to offset the costs of moving the funds within their own addresses as well. |
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I think OP isn't selling the plates? Just the idea of etching the seeds onto a metal plate using an obscure method. It would be a good idea to test it out on a stainless steel and get someone to stress it if possible. I know certain methods tend to result in the backup being really hard to see after that. It can be dependent on the kind of metal used for the backup as well though. |
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If you introduce concepts which favors those that has the most resources (having more coins, more ASICs), then you reach the same degree of centralization. That argument is valid for both. The argument for PoW and against PoS is that there is a greater opportunity costs for PoW than PoS, in the case of a rogue miner. They stand to lose both the value of their coins, the equipment, the resources spent, etc.
In the case of PoS, they can support multiple forks without losing out. The degree of fault tolerant for PoS is 1/3 of the network going rogue as compared to 1/2 for PoW.
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Seems like a complex process for determining fees, with "negotiating" between the sender the network. As a casual user, figuring out how much I should set as the fee before every transaction seems a bit unwieldy. I guess one way to do it is just to look at the recent transactions in the most recent block and see roughly what the minimum fee is.
For on-chain transaction, probably. You would want to look at the state of the mempool instead, which reflects the fee markets in real time, though caveat being that transactions do not necessarily have to exist in the mempool before a block. The minimum fees is always fixed, the minimum fee to enter the mempool and have a reasonable time can vary according to the current mempool, not necessarily on the trend based on the past few blocks. Is this potentially something which might hinder mass adoption? And is there any upcoming updates which might streamline this process a bit more? Or is lightning network meant to resolve this?
No. The process of determining the correct fee is very straightforward. The thing hindering mass adoption is the capacity of it, which is a direct causation to the higher fees. The scarcity of the block space or capacity results in a greater competition for it on the network. |
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If there was a financial incentive for them to mine zero-fee transactions they would. But I agree it requires more study. You can't just say you're going to pay them 10 bitcoin for every block mined neglecting everything else.
Correct. Well I think 2 or 3 hours is not unreasonble. It could be alot cheaper than paying an actual transaction fee. Obviously it's not going to work for someone that needs to send alot of individual transactions in a short timeframe. But it would be ideal for the casual bitcoin weekend warrior. They would really get excited about the prospect of paying no fee!
It depends. The time taken to generate that is dependent on your own PC/phone which ends up as kind of a discriminatory policy; only those who have a sufficiently powerful computers can generate it quickly and those who don't have that can take hours or days. Going by this, then those people are very likely to not want to waste their time to try to do this and would rather pay $1 - $5 to just immediately send their transaction. Ahh yes the old spammer problem clogging up the network. Hasn't bitcoin dealt with them just fine already? Or are they still waiting in the woodwork ready to descend upon innocent miners once the lights turn off like a bunch of hungry cockroaches?
Nope. Bitcoin dealt with it just fine because fees became so expensive. A few years ago, the spam was artificially generated and it wasn't necessarily expensive, considering the costs of Bitcoin at that time. Botnets are fairly suitable for spamming the network, if you introduce a PoW which is fast on CPUs and going by the concept. |
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Note that there has been a gradual increase in the price of Bitcoin for the past few weeks and that likely has an impact on the miners switching on their previously unprofitable machines. The decrease in the difficulty is definitely not completely attributed to miners shifting out of China but also from miners who didn't mine due to the decrease in the price and thus the profitability.
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Do miners check that confirmed transactions from other miners have waited a sufficient nlocktime for a transaction? They must do...
Nodes do. If not, then I still don't fully understand what prevents a miner from processing delayed transactions early, since the signed transaction has all information viewable at any stage and a delayed locktime isn't relayed downstream, as far as I understand. It's mostly related to the honesty of the miners, isn't it? It's not really a concern, since the number of people desiring such a method would be minimal.
Each node will check the transactions within a block such that they have to be final with respect to the MTP of the past 11 blocks. Miners can include non-final transactions, but it would just result in the block being considered invalid to the rest of the network. |
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There is no indication that China wants to spend the efforts to try to centralize Bitcoin, or control Bitcoin's functions. On the contrary, a certain mining pool tried to impose restrictions based on loosely defined sanctions on their own blocks. It is also quite important to note that; China's majority hashrate doesn't mean anything. China has a vast land area and the coordination of such an attack would be a logistical disasters which amounts to probably little to no impact to crypto in the long term.
Bitcoin has never been more or less decentralized. Miners are always flocking to areas with favorable policies and good costs-profit ratio. Going by the assumptions, then Bitcoin mining cannot get more or less decentralized just by miners moving their operations around. It is always going to be centralized around a certain region, or a specific group of miners.
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