[Plain Old Bitcoin]

Hello everyone,
Historically, in the main and trending bitcoin literature, the idea of sidechains have been shifted from a scaling solution to a testbed recommendation, a sandbox for experimenting weird ideas. It happened mostly because, the same guys who pioneered the original idea, somehow abandoned it as a scaling solution and focused on LN for this purpose, which is not a blockchain technology, after all. They have stressed enough on testbed and sandbox properties of a sidechain as an advantage, from the first day, so they have their own excuse for the shift, I don't buy it, TBH, but it is ok, not here to put fingers and making accusations, I'm just exploring the field and sharing ideas with forum members, whenever there is something with a merit.

Just a few hours ago, this was posted in a bitcoin-dev discussion thread:

-snip-

A "reasonably standard" approach was pioneered in Elements Alpha, where an entire federated sidechain is created and then used as a testbed for new mechanisms, such as SegWit and `OP_CHECKSIGFROMSTACK`.
However, obviously the cost is fairly large, as you need an entire federated sidechain.
-snip-

which reminded me of this "sidechain as scaling solution vs testbed" controversy, encouraging me to change some plans, sharing this idea, as I'm a believer in literature and discourse and their impact on everything including technical developments.

As a matter of fact, sidechain related ideas and constructs are building blocks of a frameork that I'm working on (to be shared as well, very soon, I hope). The interesting point about this framework is that the sidechains under consideration are essentially nothing other than standalone instances of the original bitcoin! No disruptive new feature (not even the notorious covenants support ), nothing other than some glues, suture, cesors,etc. I mean few protocol stuff and features for interactions and relaxation of constraints suchas being backward compatible with old technologies and so fort, still, nothing other than our Plain Old Bitcoin, essentially. I'm not a genius, you know, just a regular person who is obsessed with integrating and things using glues.  

So, how is that impressive, fellas? The idea of using bitcoin as its own sidechain?

Transaction verification is single threaded

Hasn't been since 2012.

I'm afraid, this PR wasn't helpful enough for utilizing modern multicore CPUs:

Firstly it is NOT about parallel transaction verification, instead it postpones script verification by queuing it for a future multi thread processing which is called right before ending the block verification that is done single threaded. This thread joins to the final multi-thread script processing.
The logic behind such a sophisticated scheme apparently has something to do with the complexities produced by transaction packages where we have transactions with fresh inputs that are outputs of other transactions in the same block. I've proposed an algorithm for handling this situation, BTW.

Secondly, it uses cs_main lock excessively, keeping the lock constantly active through the script verification itself, hence leaving little room for parallelism to have a scalable impact on the block verification process. In practice, it has been experimentally shown (and even discussed in the PR 2060 related comments) that the overhead of the scheme rapidly outperforms gains once it is configured for utilizing more threads than the actual CPU cores and it stays around 30% improvement with 4 Cores, not an encouraging result and far from scalable behavior.

[miner alienation]

Bitcoin mining scene has been dominated by pools since 2011 as a result of the infamous pooling pressure flaw which is a direct result of winner-take-all approach to PoW, adopted by Satoshi Nakamoto, from the first beginning.

Although there are some arguable facts, Bitcoin's implementation of winner-take-all makes it a fair gamble for miners, but fairness is not enough for gamblers to participate in the game because nobody can afford unlimited resources and time needed for a guaranteed break-even/win status. It is why pools are necessary for bitcoin mining; they eliminate/hide the gambling nature of the original bitcoin mining scheme almost completely, letting the industry to grow just like a normal business: tell me how much hash rate you got, so I would tell you how your business looks like in terms of costs and revenues

Many people, including myself, do not like pools, they are centralized entities that introduce a series of risk factors to the Bitcoin ecosystem compromising the most basic decentralization assumptions for the least, but the most serious consequence is what I call it miner alienation. As a matter of fact miners are not just being abstracted from the gambling nature of mining, they are also abstracted from the whole network.

For a pooling scheme to do anything useful in terms of hiding the variance and risks, it needs to give a substantial difficulty leverage, hence a considerable number of blocks should be submitted to the pool operator/server (typically thousands per second for large pools) which makes it absolutely impossible to fetch/validate all of them as long as they are supposed to be conventional Bitcoin blocks. It is why they've adopted a top-down block generation method in which the Pool operator builds a block template then relays its header to its clients, i.e. miners, waiting for them to find a nonce; add a few tricks to this model, and you have Stratum the current de facto standard for pooling in PoW world.

Suddenly, there was left no reason for miners to be aware of the Bitcoin network, e.g. by running a full node, and,  except for a few very large mining farms, overnight, bitcoin miners turned to zombies, alienated from the actual bitcoin protocol, unconsciously and exhaustively searching for a meaningless nonce that makes a meaningless 80 bytes long string look pretty enough to be claimed as a share. Indisputably, this situation MUST change, but how?  

Although I've been trying to find a way for fixing the situation with pools, it was just a while ago that I realized how ignorant I am about the economics of the subject, and it took not more than a few days for me to realize that I'm not an exception as there is no model available (well, AFAIK) to describe the economics behind PoW pooling business.

By economic model I mean a mathematical cost vs benefit analysis of pooling as a business. Many authors have shown interest in reward distribution mechanisms used by pools from a game theoretic point of view mainly for mitigating adversarial behaviors such as block/share withholding.

Although reward distribution model is an important topic and one can find interesting mathematical material here to play with, by no means it can be categorized as a mathematical model for the core pooling business as it doesn't cover the most important question:

What is the break-even threshold for the fee that pools charge?

I was even more surprised when after applying naive probability techniques and failing to approach anywhere close to the answer, I find out myself dealing with a decades old problem in mathematics known as the utility of gambling.

I'm wondering if there is any related previous work that I was not able to spot, it is why I started this thread, asking members to share any resources/thoughts about the question I bolded above.

Why and how is this important?
Like it or not, pooling is an abnormal phenomenon for PoW and the pressure toward it is nothing less than a flaw, a flaw that is a consequence of winner-take-all approach that historically dominated PoW starting with Nakamoto and Bitcoin, nevertheless any reasonable advocate would agree that this should be addressed somehow.

There can be two different approaches to this problem:

1- Designing a winners-take-share model of PoW,
Initially, I tried this approach a couple of years ago, and I believe my PoCW proposal was a good start, but it needs a hard fork or a project for a brand-new coin, neither is my primary target now.

2- Improving/replacing Stratum and how miners of winner-take-all PoW coins, specially Bitcoin, deal with their variance nightmare.
It is the way to go, I believe, but a closer examination of the current projects is not encouraging for the least to say.

Stratum 2.0 project:
It is a total disappointment in spite of the hype and the advertisement. No fundamental redefinition of roles and a desperate attempt to give miners a right to negotiate the block contents they are mining without any creative idea for justifying and realizing such an attempt and all of it wrapped in an ugly and complicated set of protocols.

P2Pool and decentralized pooling:
Not scalable! P2Pool utilizes a 20 to 1 leverage while it can't improve too much and a closer look reveals that you can't use this protocol recursively because of the reward distribution complexities involved.

I conclude that the true solution to the pooling problem is the one which is not tried or even proposed yet, and all we can do is giving a general sketch of it:

1- It should be decentralized as much as possible and this property should improve through time instead of declining.

2- It should be an open and permission-less ecosystem, people should be able to join or leave deliberately while they can choose their role with minimum requirement.

3- Roles and relationships of the parties involved, miners, pool operators, and the network, should be redefined radically.

4- The costs and revenues of each party should be economically justifiable.

Taking features 2,3,and 4  into account, I think it is not that hard to understand the importance of an economic model for the future of pooling in Bitcoin and PoW coins generally.

It'd be  very easy to implement:

1- Generating transactions with multiple UTXOs with the same P2PKH/P2SH address, the wallet does not bother including the same witness data for each input, instead it adds a simple placeholder with length 1.

2- Verifying any transaction with multiple inputs, the client software temporarily saves addresses for the duration of the same transaction verification thread, that are signed and processed routinely, and whenever encounters the placeholder instead of rejecting the txn, checks whether the input address is already processed or not.

Use cases
Organizations/individuals maintain a single address for very long periods of time to collect funds like donations, etc.

Miners keep mining on the same address as a pool client, receiving funds on this address continuously.

Some financial relations, legally depend on a specific number of addresses to which payments should take place repeatedly.

Historical Objection
I remember this idea been discussed and denounced by Greg Maxwell because he believes such options possibly encourage address re-use that is considered a bad practice in bitcoin.

Possible modern objection
With Schnorr and taproot with signature aggregation built-in capabilities coming, it is just useless.

My stand
I don't think the re-use problem is relevant here, either people understand the risks involved in re-using their addresses or they don't in the second case they will do it anyway while the first group, the knowledgeable user, may find the risks involved affordable in special use-cases.
As of Schnorr signature support, I think the adoption process will be slow, and for a very long period of time we have to deal with ECDSA as the main trend and forever as a legacy one.

The problem
Unfortunately, as much as it is easy to implement, it looks to be very hard in terms of forking, legacy wallets will reject such blocks and won't commit to the legal chain anymore, so, this proposal should be dropped unless somebody could find a soft way to do it.

Everybody is happy, BTC is skyrocketing and many dreams are becoming true, it feels so good, looking in the skeptics eyes, telling the magical 3 words: I Told You, right?

But I'm getting a bit nervous as well:
Isn't it too much of a technical burden for Bitcoin, maintaining such a mission ever increasingly critical network?

I'm afraid it is, at the time of this writing, each Bitcoin block is switching hundreds of millions of dollars, being happy and proud does not change the fact that as much as bitcoin surges so does incentives for adversarial behavior, hence, RISKS.

How do you think? What are the risks involved? I think it is time to discuss it seriously and in a very responsible manner, actually I'm surprised not seeing such a dialogue here! It is not a PR forum, we don't need to be cautious about stupid investors who may reconsider their plans hearing the scary word "RISK", they don't come here, at least in this sub-forum, D&T Discussion, and the smart ones will become more enthusiastic realizing that it is not just about cheering and applauding and there are people who take care of the risks as well.

[Big picture]

Hello everybody,

This is a follow-up for Royse's excellent topic about helping forum members with financial problems due to the novice coronavirus pandemic. Royse is working hard for establishing a trusted group of community members in charge of overseeing the fundraising process.

Meantime I'm trying to contribute by initiating a lottery with good faith here, please refer to the main thread for more discussions of any type, about the main idea which belongs to @Royse777 and stay focused on the lottery mechanism I'm proposing and avoid discussing anything other than this lottery proposal here, thank you all.

Before proceeding any more you need to understand that the financial transactions both for buying the tickets and paying to winners will be managed by the same project board that Royce is working on. I won't engage in transactions just helping out the main project as a volunteer!

Big picture
1- This is going to be a weekly lottery drawing and by weekly we mean every 1008 bitcoin blocks.

2- Bitcoin blockchain is used both as the source of randomness for drawing this lottery and as a sorting mechanism (with a minor twist) for assigning the ticket numbers.

3- It is not a fair lottery. The total income coming from ticket sale in each drawing is split among four pools:

• 20% will go to the Mega Jackpot Pool for full match events.
• 30% will go to the Proportional Pool which will be distributed among tickets proportional to their relative match
• 20% will go to the Best Match Pool and will be awarded to the ticket(s) with the best match for the current drawing.
• The remaining 30% will go to the Royce project just like a normal donation to be supervised by the board for supporting qualified forum members impacted by the pandemic.

This way, for each drawing round, half of the sales are re-distributed by drawing among the ticket owners, 20% is reserved for incentivizing future drawings and the remaining 30% will be donated to the Covid-19 Aid Project, proposed by Royse777.

How does it work?

A) Almost 24 hours before the bitcoin blockchain is expected to reach #Head block:

• Starting a thread named "Covid-19 Aid: Lottery Drawing X", I'll sign and announce a hash value generated by sha256(SatoshiSeed|RandSeed) called SeedHash as well as #Head (the block height that will be considered the start point of the round) and #Tail (the block height that ends the round, typically 1008 blocks away from #Head). SatoshiSeed is an English phrase quoted from bitcoin's White Paper and RandSeed is a number between 0 and 10,000,000 represented in ASCI decimal comma separated format (like "3,476,990") both picked deliberately and randomly by me for each round as a temporary secret. They will be kept private during the round and will be disclosed and used as part of the drawing algorithm later.
  
• The Royce Project Board will sign a message containing a (P2SH) bitcoin address, the Round Address, for selling tickets of each round, at the same time.

B) As a donor/player you are encouraged to participate in each drawing round by following this procedure:

• 1- You send (a whole number of) between 1-100 mBTC to the (above mentioned) Round Address. Sending any amount more than 100 mBTC is considered as a direct donation to the initiative. IOW: a maximum of 100 tickets are allocated to each transaction, one for each 100,000 Satoshis, and the remaining satoshis, if any, will go to the donation wallet of the project).
• 2-As soon as your transaction is included in the blockchain, using the basic property of bitcoin blockchain as a sorting mechanism for transactions,  I'll calculate your Raw Ticket Number(s) simply by starting from the last assigned Raw Ticket Number+1 up to the number of mBTCs you have paid; transactions are prioritized by the blockchain already.
• 3- You claim the ownership of the tickets by sending me a signed message using the same key of (anyone of) spending input(s) of your transaction. I'll approve and forward your claim to the board immediately. You are free to announce your contribution in public as long as it is approved or select not to disclose it in public.
• 4- For each Raw Ticket Number, RTN, Applicable Ticket Number, ATN, is calculated using RandSeed^*, as: RTN = (ATN+RS) mod 10,000,000
  ATN is the number used for evaluating your ticket(s) in each drawing

^* Please note that RS is not disclosed until the round is over.

C) Once #Tail is reached and six more blocks are piled-up we go to the drawing event as follows:

• 1- I disclose both the SatoshiSeed and the RandSeed for the round, people are free to examine the consistency of the disclosed information with the SeedHash commitment I've made at the start.
• 2- Raw Ticket Numbers, RTNs are mapped to Applicable Ticket Numbers, ATNs, using the above formula, and newly disclosed RS.
• 3- The decimal representation of the four rightmost bytes of the #Head block hash considered as a little-endian unsigned integer is taken and another mod(10,000,000) operation is performed to generate the RoundKey.
• 4- The round prizes are scheduled as follows:
  
  • The Mega JackPot is awarded to the ATN with a full 7 decimal digits Match with the RoundKey. The winner is excluded from the list.
  • The Best Match Pool goes to the ATN(s) with the largest number of matched rightmost decimal digits with the RoundKey. Note that the lucky winner of Mega Jackpot is already awarded her price and excluded from the list.
  • The Proportional Pool (30%) winners are selected as follows:
    
    • 25% of the Proportional Pool prize goes to ATNs with matching last 3 digits of the Round Key.
    • 50% of the untouched Proportional Pool prize goes to ATNs with matching last 2 digits of the RoundKey. The winner(s) of the previous step, if any, are excluded.
    • 100% of the untouched Proportional Pool prize goes to ATNS with matching last decimal digit of the RoundKey. The winner(s) of the previous step, if any, are excluded.

Summary
The bitcoin blockchain is used both as the source for random number generation and sorting lottery ticket numbers sold with an additional entropy designed to prevent very unlikely collision between pools/miners and players (a totally fictional situation for a lottery of this scale and a blockchain of bitcoin's scale  ).
Half of the money is re-distributed by luck to the buyers in each round, after deducting a 30% lion share for donating to the Royse's Covid-19 Aid Project under development, another 20% part goes to the jackpot which lasts until a 1/10,000,000 chance of a full match is hit by a lucky ticket buyer.

[Is 51% attack a double-spending threat to bitcoin?]

Is 51% attack a double-spending threat to bitcoin?

My answer: No!

My argument: By definition, bitcoin is a solution to the double-spending problem:

Abstract.  A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.  Digital signatures provide part of the solution, but the main benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required to prevent double-spending. We propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer network. The network timestamps transactions by hashing them into an ongoing chain of hash-based proof-of-work, forming a record that cannot be changed without redoing the proof-of-work.

The way Satoshi puts it in the very first line of the white paper, as a solution, bitcoin is immune against, rather than resistant to, double-spending. Double-spending makes digital cash absolutely worthless because of its potential to suffer from unregulated inflation. Bitcoin is safe against such inflation inherently and it is not because of PoW on top of or game theory behind bitcoin. In its most vicious (and ignorant) way of malfunctioning, a majority of hash power could defraud single users and won't be able to create bitcoins out of nowhere.

Misinterpretation: A majority of hash power collided is claimed to be a double-spending threat to bitcoin because of the sole power of chain-reorgs that let them defraud users. Yet it is not a proper classification of this threat as such practices are bound by cost/incentive tradeoffs according to the game theory employed by bitcoin.

My take (which is a surprise somehow):
Unlike what is said ever and ever, one could put trust in miners as long as there is proof that:

• Miners are not inflating the supply illegally,
• The costs involved in defrauding him/her (personally) by re-org attacking the bllockchain are orders of magnitude higher than the assets he/she has put in stake.
  

This is the fundamental principle behind a hierarchical sharding scheme which I'll propose later.

Somebody is getting more aggressive and abuses his power frequently:

A reply of yours, quoted below, was deleted by a Bitcoin Forum moderator. Posts are most frequently deleted because they are off-topic, though they can also be deleted for other reasons. In the future, please avoid posting things that need to be deleted.

Two-way-pegged so-called "side-chains" is all that Dirvechain is about and it is what LN is doing right now with the exception that the latter doesn't require any form of soft forks, unlike Drivechain. Ironically, they have been working on this layer-2 solution to scalability in Block Stream for years along with LN and when it won the race and deployed, all of a sudden they abandoned the original idea. 

What Maxwell says in his long mail is not directly a criticism of the idea but a general understanding of the way an open-source project should be handled, refuting "roadmap" oriented approaches to this issue, like what has ruined Ethereum already. I didn't find any specific "criticism" from his side but for Poelstra it is not the case he is concerned about the security of putting everything in hands of miners "with the current centralized situation in mining bitcoin" which I think Greg Maxwell shares with him because of the latest debate I had with him.

Here is the thing, LN is complicated and liquidity hungry because it relies just on Hashed Time-Locked Contracts, HTLC and non-LN sidechain ideas are abandoned because of the stupid situation with pools and ASICs! And guess what? We are doomed as long as we are trapped with such a discourse: two-way pegged sidechains as a scaling solution for bitcoin.

BTW, I'm working on a one-way sidechain solution that absorbs bitcoin gradually by its own virtue (if ever), stay tuned 

Removing this post is an obvious sign of abusing moderation power because there is nothing offensive or any misinformation presented in there. Somebody is doing what he can to guarantee nothing meaningful is ever said in the technical subforum just a bunch of boring applauses about how 'great' and 'genius' he is! Very disappointing for a forum established by an anonymous believer in decentralization and freedom of speech. 

In another topic regarding Taproot proposal, one contributor said something about the type of the fork required and someone else told things about how UASF that implemented SegWit was good because of the so-called Covert AsicBoost conspiracy that allegedly Bitmain was involved in and finally the legendary Gregory Maxwell intervened by confirming the above conspiracy theory, ...

I've been following this AsicBoost thing since the beginning and as far as my research shows this is one of the most stupid conspiracy theories in cryptocurrency ever:

According to this theory, Ahead of SegWit fork, Bitmain had developed AsicBoost friendly miners which enjoy a special ASIC circuitry that is supposed to have like 25% performance edge over conventional ASICs in the market.

The conspiracy requires the machine to change the block header^* specifically something in the first 64 bytes of the header should be altered this first 64 bytes (chunk1) is consisted of:
nVersion (4 byte)
PrevHash(32 bytes)
MerkleRoot Head(28 bytes)
MerkleRootTail(4bytes)

^*There is an alternative approach which is not relevant here, tho

Obviously there are 2 candidates for the conspiracy to work: the first and the last fields. In practice playing with nVersion field is both 'not-covert' (actually it is called overt method) and since a long time ago (after BIP 9) 'not-legal' because the field is now used as a means of signaling protocol in Bitcoin Core. So, you are left with MerkleRoot.

For the hypothetical evil AB device to be able to play with MerkleRoot there are two options available:
1- Altering the content of a transaction (preferably in higher levels of the Merkle Tree)
2- Re-ordering the transactions in the Merkle Tree

Shuffling the transactions (the second method) is possible by employing different algorithms among them an algorithm which has a small footprint is proposed which is more adequate for an ASIC device rather than a cpu or a gpu, it is called on-the-fly reordering.

Here is how SegWitis related to this issue, SegWit embeds a wtxid tree Merkle root hash in the coinbase transaction. Re-ordering the transactions in a reckless manner makes this hash void and the verification process fails!

This is it! A covert AsicBoost attempt is made harder because some algorithms for the second method can't fix the problem with SegWit root hash. But wait, don't we have the first method still working? Tampering the contents of a transaction? adding new transactions? Removing one transaction? Sure we have! Lots of possibilities out there to remain covert.

You are free to check this comprehensive summary that requires little prerequisites in terms of being familiar with the subject. The bottom line is:  
SegWit is not a destructive challenge for AsicBoost. End of the story.


Now, I'm adding one more important point here:

The whole conspiracy theory was about how the hypothetical Bitmain's AB miner is compromised by SegWit because it is no longer able to alter Merkle root of the block header, yes? But is an ASIC miner able to do such thing ever? Altering the Merkle Root? Of course not! It violates the contract between the miner and the pool, remember? Only a gigantic solo miner is able to think about such an attack and he or she should do it by using a cpu centrally and dispatching the collided headers afterward.

I conclude that the whole conspiracy theory about such a machine that attempts to find collisions for itself locally is superficial.

[Hereby, I officially ask Gregory Maxwell to step down from his moderation positions in this forum]

Hi,
I'm not starting this to attack Gregory Maxwell, on the contrary, it is about praising him.

Gregory Maxwell is a techno/political icon and a legend. He has full rights to be biased in favor of or against any single topic in the bitcoin ecosystem, actually, he should be biased, otherwise, who is in charge of taking care of hypes, FUDs and scams?

My point is, such a figure doesn't need any authority in this forum to do his job as a think tank, and this forum doesn't need a biased moderator on the other side.

I understand; bitcoin is money and money was born with blood on his hands but believe it or not, bitcoin needs to evolve and nobody is in charge of its evolution path, it is not Ethereum, there is no Foundation and no Vitalik neither any stupid roadmap in bitcoin because it is not a project. It needs space and opportunity for divergent ideas and out of the box thinking.

I don't want to go to the details and put forward how Greg's biased point of view is affecting his job as a forum moderator, it would be absolutely unnecessary, it is not about this or that evidence supporting or refuting my concerns, it is about a general situation we are dealing with: a conflict of interests.

Hereby, I officially ask Gregory Maxwell to step down from his moderation positions in this forum.

Edit: I'm not and won't be campaigning for this to happen, please don't terrorize me or try to make me quite. I have no plan to argue about what I said and won't answer stupid attacks by shills.

[bitcoin adoption]

Hi all,

I'm not a bitcoin whale not even a person who has bought like few coins and is praying for the price to skyrocket. On the contrary, I've exhausted all my coins and savings to keep myself full time focused on bitcoin as my research field instead of what I've been doing for years as an ordinary software engineer and a programmer. Not that ordinary in the latter field tho.  

So, from my point of view bitcoin adoption is not an urgent personal requirement at all. Actually I'm totally satisfied with what bitcoin has done up to now: great codebase, excellent discussions, a decade of 24*7 mission-critical task accomplished with almost no interrupts, absolutely no failure,  ... bitcoin is amazing from a technical perspective.

But before being a software guy, I'm a human being and an activist. I want peace and justice and equal opportunities and prosperity for mankind and health and safety and preservation of species for the planet. Actually bitcoin became my main technical concern because of its superiority in ethical aspects. It was the first field of commercial activity ever that I found to be coherent with my half/spare time occupation as an activist, it was why I quitted my job and stick with bitcoin, a life-time decision.

So, aliashraf the idealist, wants adoption to happen while aliashraf the dev does not care that much about it, why should he? Technical curiosity? come on, out there zillions of technical problems to masturbate with, in cryptocurrency and other IT fields, let alone physics and cosmology.

A bitcoin whale/hodler/investor faces a dilemma: on one hand, he needs bitcoin to be mass-adopted because it is what can eventually make bitcoin to skyrocket but on the other hand, there is a lot of contradictions that discourage him, most importantly, they don't like change and putting their assets in the risk of hypes and tensions. It is how it works, the real world, people are ready to invest a tiny fraction of their savings on a promising technology, but when it happens and they get rich, it will be time for conservatism, so natural.

People in bitcoin ecosystem are hybrids of devs, investors, activists, ordinary users, ... As long as we are asking about agendas and objectives it is totally about the ingredients: How much of each factor is presented in the anatomy of each person who is somehow active in bitcoin?

But no matter who you are and what's your priorities, bitcoin mass adoption is a goal you need to respect eventually because it is not just about expansion but about survival, systems either grow or collapse, without mass-adoption bitcoin will fade out.

Among many things that one can suggest for this to happen, technical challenges are the most important ones. Bitcoin is technology after all, isn't it? So, how is it possible to have bitcoin adopted by billions of people when it is faced with centralization and scaling challenges? Sure it is not possible and let's don't get the "world reserve currency" claims as serious rhetoric, they are not, ask a BS economics graduate.

My proposition in this topic is as follows:
Bitcoin mass-adoption is subject to technical developments that should and can happen simultaneously in three critical fields: Decentralization, Scaling and Privacy.


I strongly denounce Buterine's claim about the existence of a so-called trilemma which implies that it is impossible or (as he has retreated to it recently) very hard to achieve to such a state.

I am aware of the popularity of Buterine's trilemma among some bitcoiners, core devs and LN believers who are naysayers to ambitious improvement ideas because of the balance of the above-mentioned ingredients in their blood.  
All I have to mention to these folks is that Buterine himself is retreating from his claim not only officially but also by advocating in favor of Serenity and Eth 2.0!

During my research, for a long time, I have mainly focused on decentralization targetting both ASICs and pools as evils, postponing scaling and privacy problems. To be clear, I don't believe in security as an independent problem, it is rather a spin-off from centralization scenarios. I formulated some ideas and proposals for both ASICs and pools, specifically, I made a thorough analysis of pooling pressure flaw in bitcoin and proposed an alternative approach to bitcoin like PoW systems which are based on a winner-takes-all idea, instead I proposed a collaborative proof of Work method.

Thereafter I began to realize that both centralization and scaling issues in bitcoin are by no means subjects of a trade-off unlike the poisonous ideas behind the trilemma of Vitalik Buterine and more interestingly they are not essentially and radically two different problems and both could be understood as consequences of the same (now, let's say) flaw: winner-takes-all.

My latest work is focused on a comprehensive solution to this problem and I think it is in a good state, almost ready to publish and I'll share it with bitcoin community asap, for the time being, I'm just wondering:

1) How important do you think such a project is?

2) Who is ready to jump in by dedicating actual resources to support/participate in a project tackling centralization, scaling, and privacy at the same time without any trade-offs, i.e without sacrificing one in favor of the other two?

Please note:
I'm talking about bitcoin, my agenda involves no forks and no alt-coins don't waste your valuable time debating about how bad is a  fork and how disappointing would be an alt.

Hello,
I made a mistake and posted a reply in @CarltonBanks thread about minisketch. It is self-moderated and you know Carlton: a troll who fakes being a troll hunter

Wtxids are not used anywhere (so it shouldn't be pre-computed already) and they are more expensive to compute,

Sure they are, they're required to tell two different transactions apart.

With all due respects, I completely disagree. Two different wtxids do not represent two different txns but different txids definitively do so.

When txs are only identified by txids I can take a valid transaction mutate its witness to make it invalid (or just too low a feerate), and it'll have the same txid, so if you fetch by txid you can't avoid fetching the same junk multiple times.

Why should you? Because you are an adversary? So, as an adversary, couldn't you produce multiple witness data for the same tx? Aren't we back to the transaction malleability era?

My point is wtxids are vulnerable to txn malleability and I see no reason to use them in minisketch or any new proposal.

To be more specific: I think even in the bootstrap process we could have segwit witness data pruned if there were enough blocks under which the containing block is buried.

I've just received this e-mail from Github:

GitHub <noreply@github.com>

to me
Due to U.S. trade controls law restrictions, your GitHub account has been restricted.
For individual accounts, you may have limited access to free GitHub public repository
services for personal communications only. Please read about GitHub and Trade Controls at
https://help.github.com/articles/github-and-trade-controls for more information

So, people of Iran(like me), Cuba, Syria, North Korea and Crimea (200 millions?) are subject to US Trade Controls as a whole and they can't use GitHub accordingly 

Any comments?

[offline bitcoin transactions]

Following link is an article including a guide to something the author insists to call offline bitcoin transactions, such schemes are trending nowadays:
https://medium.com/@notgrubles/completely-offline-bitcoin-transactions-4e58324637bd

It is 5 min read and if you would bother taking a look, you would easily grab the point:

1- We have a wallet full node/spv with no outbound connection just using BlockStream Satellite service.

2- Somehow we decide to send few coins to an address.

3- We generate a signed txn using our wallet, as we don't have outbound connections, without trying to relay we store it as raw text or a QR image.

4- We use a non-internet message relay system (like TxTenna or LoraWan ) or we can simply post our txn to either the receiver herself and get txn relayed to the actual p2p network.

5- Once the transaction is included in the blockchain, our one-way satellite link with BlockStream lets our node to be informed of the event because the whole block is broadcasted using a push protocol anyway.

It would be easy to criticize this model for its dependency on BlockStream Satellite service. Though, I don't like trivial takes when it comes to such schemes and in this case it is more than obvious that our node/wallet is exclusively bound to a trusted source, so what?

The main advantage of this model is its censorship/surveillance resistance, we are not present on internet and they just can't track/block our ip and it is good but is it good enough?

No, it is not:
First of all I think it is too much to call such a simple model offline transaction it is just confusing, using a non-ip relay network to send your transactions doesn't make bitcoin or its transaction processing offline. It is just an offline transaction relay model, nothing more and it is not enough as I said.

Alternatively I'm working on a true offline technology which I prefer to call it off-chain transaction processing that I will discuss in more details about it in next posts. For the starter I wanted to know how do you guys think about this subject and perceive this term: off-chain transaction processing. Heads up, I'm not talking about LN or side chains, ... it is bitcoin transactions being processed offline.

Again it would be easy to denounce such a concept as paradoxical or ambiguous but as I said, trivial takes are not helpful.
Saying things like: "Hey, as long as we are speaking of bitcoin transactions, they are processed on-chain", wouldn't help as we are all aware of that.

To be a bit more specific by off-chain bitcoin transaction processing I mean a technology that allows wallets to exchange bitcoin txns, just like paper money/bills, multiple times with multiple parties engaged without leaving any trace on the blockchain other than circumstances that one of the parties, decides to deposit it.

[draft feature]

I just lost like one hundred lines of text including a data sheet I was preparing to start a new topic in development & technical subforum because of the naive way the draft feature is implemented with.

I don't use other word processors when I'm posting here no matter how long and sophisticated is my post and takes how much time or effort to write it down and it puts me in danger of losing my content and to mitigate it I regularly use preview button because it is supposed to save a draft of my work in progress but when it comes to a sophisticated post that takes days to be ready things get more risky and you need to re-preview your work because of this:

Drafts are saved whenever you preview or post a topic, post, or PM. Up to 100 drafts are kept. Drafts are deleted after 7 days.

Fair enough, 100 drafts is not bad and automation is great idea but the implementation is a joke and put me in a huge trouble. It turned out that they mean it when they say whenever.  

WHENEVER you push postor preview  bottoms you get a draft and if you push this several times on the same subject (a post or a pm) you get one more and (it is really stupid) you can easily make 100 copies of the same thing saved as draft and because you can't have more than 100 drafts, you lose drafts of your works in progress.

It is what happened to me the other night when after a crash I tried to recover my work using this feature and I found that I've pushed post/preview buttons on few other posts too much (multiple edits) and I have a lot of stupid versions of same posts and I don't have any draft of my actual work in progress because of the pile of garbage this feature has produced and buried what I actually need as draft.

I think some tweaks would be very helpful:
1- Don't keep multiple drafts for a subject (post/pm) just keep the latest version.
2- Don't generate drafts for post operation.

In governance Ethereum is far more centralized than bitcoin, they have Vitalik both as a celebrity and a spiritual leader and believe it or not they have a roadmap  

IMO, a cryptocurrency with a leader,  is not reliable in the first place, but when the leader turns out to be a PoS believer in charge of a PoW coin things get even more confusing. I believe that Eth 2018 falling down 3 times worse than bitcoin has some thing to do with this fact.

Still there are good news as well: Vitalik is growing up and stepping down, well, not officially and completely but there exist signs. Most importantly, in January 5 latest Ethereum core dev meeting ended with a long-waiting admission, tentatively tho, of implementing ProgPoW as an anti-asic algorithm to retire Ethash. ProgPoW is designed to utilize gpu strengths such that it is almost impossible for asic manufacturers to build a considerably more efficient chip for mining it and not ending to to a gpu design project.

It is an important event in cryptocurrency and I think we will be witnessing a new wave of debates and discussions in bitcoin community regarding the situation with ASICs and the potentials for an anti-ASIC fork.

[some of which involved]

I made this post in my other topic : The situation with Iran, but it seems to go beyond that scope, so I started this one:

Today, the US federal agency in charge of Iran sanctions, Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), for the first time in bitcoin history, announced two bitcoin addresses associated to two Iranian individuals subject to secondary sanctions!

link= https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sm556

WASHINGTON – The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) took action today against two Iran-based individuals, Ali Khorashadizadeh and Mohammad Ghorbaniyan, who helped exchange digital currency (bitcoin) ransom payments into Iranian rial on behalf of Iranian malicious cyber actors involved with the SamSam ransomware scheme that targeted over 200 known victims.  Also today, OFAC identified two digital currency addresses associated with these two financial facilitators.  Over 7,000 transactions in bitcoin, worth millions of U.S. dollars, have processed through these two addresses - some of which involved SamSam ransomware derived bitcoin. In a related action, the U.S. Department of Justice today indicted two Iranian criminal actors for infecting numerous data networks with SamSam ransomware in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada since 2015.  

“Treasury is targeting digital currency exchangers who have enabled Iranian cyber actors to profit from extorting digital ransom payments from their victims.  As Iran becomes increasingly isolated and desperate for access to U.S. dollars, it is vital that virtual currency exchanges, peer-to-peer exchangers, and other providers of digital currency services harden their networks against these illicit schemes,” said Treasury Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Sigal Mandelker.  “We are publishing digital currency addresses to identify illicit actors operating in the digital currency space. Treasury will aggressively pursue Iran and other rogue regimes attempting to exploit digital currencies and weaknesses in cyber and AML/CFT safeguards to further their nefarious objectives.”

Obviously, the two addresses belong to Iranian local bitcoin traders/exchanges that has been transacting bitcoin for years and the accusation of being "involved" in processing ransomware related addresses is just an excuse for weakening bitcoin in Iran by threatening people all around the world.

It is a declaration of war against bitcoin too. The dick heads in Trump administration has no clue about what they are talking about! How in the hell bitcoiners should avoid this two addresses to transact with?

And it is a proof of what I'm saying about the shady zone getting narrower:

I guess, it is no more possible for bitcoiners to live in the gray zone, it is just fading out, the gray zone:

Trump needs even more centralization of power for running his version of Fascism, Putin has already centralized everything in Russia (again) and Chinese have no clue about what a non-centralized form of power could ever be.

In monetary systems, AML/KYC discourse is getting more aggressive on a daily basis, It is about Orwell 1984 rather than Satoshi Nakamoto 2009. The true force behind bitcoin falling down is this trend and the fact that bitcoiners are doing almost nothing about it other than sticking with their few coins and waiting for dick heads in regulatory agencies to show merci and absorb them in the so-called 'legal system'.

As a smart con artist, Craig Faketoshi Wrong has understood the situation and made a decision: "Don't be shy Craig, you've never been, choose the wrong side as usual and figure out a way to keep talking in public."

The rest of bitcoiners? They are just shy!

Just a few days after the above post and they are blacklisting bitcoin addresses and threatening bitcoiners all around the world by their brutal secondary sanctions!

What?! You think they may be following my posts?

But seriously, isn't it the moment of truth for bitcoin?  

[Disclaimer:]

Disclaimer:
As a resident of Iran, I'm obviously biased toward my nation, the people who I personally know and well, mostly love. A great country it is, Iran. Thousand years of history, a very fantastic, sophisticated and sweet language FARSI (persian) which has absorbed a lot of words and concepts from Arabic pertaining its own unique and well formed grammar and rich treasury of vocabulary which has given birth to one of the most beautiful and important parts of humanity literature heritage. I love this country and its nation and I'm honored to be biased defending its right to survive and to develop.

Obviously Trump administration in the US is a global disaster (Ironic isn't it? US citizens vote on behalf of us and determine our fate!) but its worst political behavior is withdrawing from Iran nuclear deal and reinitiating the most brutal sanctions against Iran, with no excuse and no international support. Sanctions that are described as "the strongest ever in history" by US officials. In the heart of them a row of harsh restrictions  against Iran banking system, including its central bank, Bank Markazi.

Now it would be the challenge: How could bitcoin help people of Iran to resist against this dirty invasion? Isn't it the right time for bitcoiners to prove themselves as true libertarians?

I mean we have Faketoshi Wright who represents everything against bitcoin on one side but who is representing bitcoin, true bitcoin on the other side?
And what the hell other bitcoiners are doing?
Most of the prominent figures have disclosed their identities and are vulnerable to SEC/NSA prosecution and have no choice other than playing coward, I suppose.

I didn't start it to discuss about how idiot Trump is or is not, or to argue in favor of a fuckedup regime like what we've in Iran.

I'm just asking about how faithful and honest we are and how could we help people of Iran to be able to do a fair "non-nuclear" trade like buying food, drugs, weed, civil air plane parts, ... ?

Believe it or not  International Court of Justice recently ordered US to lift Iran sanctions, which Trump says he would not follow at all. Apparently it is because America has recently become great again and does not care about what the remaining 96% of human beings think or want!

Recently I started to be more active on Bitcoin Discussion subforum and became totally disappointed. A lot of noise over there low quality redundant topics pop-up every minute and bury each other under a pile of garbage. Isn't it mods job to take care of this issue?

For some reasons I couldn't manage to do enough research on Faketoshi vs Ver debate and it would be really appreciated if somebody could brief me about their theoretical divergence.

I'm already aware of parts of Wright's agenda to make (or at least keep) bcash more government friendly and persuade his victims to give him their money without hesitation. What I don't exactly know is Ver's agenda.

Personally, I don't recognize bcash as bitcoin and definitively not the idea of increasing block size as a serious scaling solution, but I believe there is always something to learn from debates in crypto ecosystem generally as it is possible to experience same situations in bitcoin.

P.S
I also have been notified that Gregory Maxwell has somehow intervened in this debate I was just curious: what's going on?