No, not even-- they start mining the empty block without even receiving the block by spying on the stratum output of other miners.

That would be nice, but you can look at the published code to see it isn't so.

In many prior activations at some point after the rules became active some broken miner managed to mine a rule violating block and some other miners who weren't broken but were just not updated yet produced blocks that continued after the invalid one.

Everyone who is updated, including correctly upgraded miners*, will just ignore those blocks like they never happened.  So the invalid block and its descendants will all become stale blocks.

If you aren't upgraded you may see confirmations that go away during such an events, and if you're a miner and not upgraded you will lose money by mining on a doomed fork during such an event.

If *many* people don't upgrade such an instance could be disruptive to the ecosystem, with various services accepting transactions on the invalid fork that will be lost when the valid fork overtakes it.

If for some reason you can't upgrade before activation it would be best to make sure your node(s) connect to the public network exclusively via an upgraded node so the upgraded node will act as a bad block filter.  This works for mining too, since older standard software won't introduce invalidity, only follow it if someone else introduces it.

If you can't even do that but are actively accepting payments, then you should require more confirmations before considering a transaction irreversible.  An extra ten might be a good starting point, depending on how quickly you'd respond do an incident.

If you're not accepting payments it's less critical to upgrade, but its still good to do so that your node can participate in helping the propagation of valid blocks and not propagating invalid blocks.

(*) A number of large miners engage in validationless mining-- they will mine empty blocks after a block without validating it. So confirmation by a string of empty or nearly empty blocks shouldn't treated as confirmation.  The emptyness is actually not a fundamental property but its easiest to implement that way so for now its a reasonable indicator that the miner hasn't actually validated anything.

Well, it does.. and least for some definition of mobile.
Not the point, the issue I'm raising is that chunks of the site aren't indexed at all, not just poorly ranked.

One possibility is that the site is being targeted by parties trying to keep information out of google.  For example, after forum user cy ph er doc (spaces to avoid the same fate for this thread) participated in a scam that ripped off a lot of people he ended up in court over it which resulted in his bitcoin address being posted Bitcointalk.  Although his bitcoin address is still on bitcointalk you can't find any of those pages in google.  So maybe he paid some service to vanish the information from the internet and they're doing something shady to get bct pages removed from google indexes? -- and stuff like that.  Maybe the cumulative effect of various scammers trying to keep pages on bct that expose them out of google might be hurting the sites visibility?

Fair point.

Though I also should have mentioned, you shouldn't sync from just the DNSseed results, you should learn addresses from them.   Syncing just from them results in more uneven distributions of load.  Bitcoin Core works pretty hard to not contact dnsseeds at all and usually only does on first run or after being offline for a long time.

You can request which service flags you want from the seeds.

Pruned nodes do serve blocks-- though only ones near the tip.  (and if you need peers that can serve older blocks ... then ask for those.)

As far as the nodes that you couldn't reach-- they may have gone down recently.  The seeder checks them but only about once a day or so.

They are also severely down weighing anything that isn't HTTPS... but the effect of this is to severely bury tons of great technical/academic/hobby info at the expense of promoting garbage filler sites and social media.

But that decision wouldn't impact bitcointalk.

I have been using duck duck for most of my searches, though it too sucks compared to google of old. -- just differently.  My concern here isn't just me though-- it's about the kind of distortions that hiding BCT threads has on the wider world.

Your bitcoin.conf configured rpcpassword likely had non-permitted characters (such as #) and so it was getting ignored.

I've noticed a large number of my old posts are no longer discoverable via google, maybe on the order of half that I search for (really informally).

Here is an example:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1427885.msg14601127#msg14601127

You should be able to find it by googling for substrings:

Example.

Yet you can't.  In fact, AFAICT, no substring will make google return anything on the first page of that thread.

If you google the thread title you get the second page of the thread and only the second page of the thread.

Duck-duck-go, however, returns it just fine.

I find it pretty demoralizing to have my posts vanish from search indexes, especially because last year Reddit changed so that negative-voted posts don't get search indexed and as a result thousands of posts of mine in rbtc effectively vanished from the internet.

Why was this even supposed to matter? Banks get in trouble for money laundering with some regularity.  They pay their fines (sometimes billions of dollars) and continue on as if nothing ever happened.

Great! So: Two years ago and entirely not about the current activation nonsense.

No that is entirely untrue.  I think I've spent a total of an hour on the subject in the last three months not including time wasted reading the endless pointless shed-painting debates. And much of that hour just testing the activation setup and the rest was mostly correcting a bit of misinfo on reddit.

I am not a Bitcoin developer, I have not been a bitcoin developer for years. I was not materially involved in the discussion around taproot activation.  The article simply made a mistake-- it was corrected before I even knew about it (THANKS to whomever reported the error!).

What the heck?  There are several reports for your post for offtopic/trolling and I'm inclined to agree.  But in the off chance that you are actually just profoundly ignorant:

Lightning is just a technique of using Bitcoin smart contracts to compress multiple Bitcoin transactions into one transaction.   After some setup, I can make a payment to you but not immediately post it to the blockchain, keeping it available to be revised as funds move back and forth. At any time either one of us can post the latest transaction to close it it. Moreover, it's possible to securely and atomically update multiple of these not-yet-final transactions, which makes it possible to pay someone you don't directly have a channel with by updating the balances of a collection of channels.

That's it-- the rest is just implementation.

Through this we can make thousands of payments but only post two transactions to the chain, and as a side benefit these benefits enjoy instant reversibility and improved privacy because they only require the interaction of the participants rather than the global network.  The tradeoff is that the participants need to be online and the underlying wallet software required more engineering effort.

Payment channel support has been built into the transaction format and consensus rules of Bitcoin since day one.  The only transactions involved in lightning are Bitcoin transactions, so it has nothing to do with altcoins.  Your post is extremely similar to saying that posts involving multisig ought to belong in an altcoin subforum.    Guess what: Not everyone uses bitcoin exactly like you do.

Lightning doesn't have anything to do with Bitcoin core,  ... at least today there is no lightning support in Bitcoin Core.  If this subforum were only about Bitcoin core, then I suppose there wouldn't be any lightning stuff in it... but it isn't.

The fact that lightning has its own complexity means that there are plenty of technical things to discuss about it.

This isn't a differential disadvantage.  For any secret sharing scheme, you need data generated at share generation, and for distributed share generation (e,g key wasn't born with a single point of failure) this means data stored from other parties.  So in both cases you need to reliably store information generated at the time of wallet generation.   Bonus, for multisig the information isn't secret--- you can go ahead and post it on your tumblr or whatever, while for secret sharing that data is secret and you could only post it on your tumblr after encrypting it.

In either case, you can just store this extra data with your private keys--  which would be a total non-issue except for the prevalence of stamped metal seed storage or whatever that has no extra room to store any data like that.

In any case, I have an *extremely* negative opinion of secret sharing as a freestanding system.  The tradeoffs it provides are poor, as a result you find it mostly used/implemented by people who aren't thinking carefully, and as a result it doesn't provide its expected positive properties and often hurts security a lot.  Essentially with SSS you are using an underlying cryptographic primitive directly, and pickup the expected bad outcomes from homebrew cryptography.

 https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Shamir_Secret_Snakeoil

The point you're trying to make is a valid one, but your expression of it isn't technically correct.  Miners can easily fake their 'support' for any flag, and they often have in the past-- e.g. signaling BTC1 when they weren't running it and had zero intention of ever running it.

So while it's true that miner signaling is sybil resistant,  the mining pools signaling flags don't necessarily have much skin in what they signal, so fairly little incentive to do so honestly.  This is particularly true because the parties with an investment in hardware are hashers (whom don't control the flags) and not pools (who do control the flags.  Many pools have significant altcoin investments and it's not too hard to imagine a kickback or altcoin play making fake signaling in a pool's interest.  Even hashers can move hashpower to altcoins that might gain value if Bitcoin had issues.

You could imagine a scheme where people pay _ethereum_ into a black hole to vote for bitcoin proposals. ... it would be an unfakable measurement, but if anything it would be anti-correlated with the wants and best interest of the Bitcoin community.

More generally,  we should always be careful when we're substituting what we can measure with what we need.  Measuring hashpower is probably only a reliable proxy when people haven't realized that they can game it, and we know for a fact now that they have.

The real unfakable metric is the eventual market price of the asset -- but we can't know that in advance, only make educated guesses.

Sounds like you have it figured out.  I thought I would point out:  It's implemented this way instead of a more obvious way so that the comparison gets compiled to constant time code.  It's also faster than the most simple non-shortcutting comparison.

If constant time wasn't needed the more obvious approach would be faster.  (though that isn't always true-- sometimes constant time code is just faster.  In this case, though only one in 2^64 inputs would need to compare more than the first word in vartime code.)

Nullius,

There is perhaps something a bit unhinged about talking some LOL April first thing and turning it into some argument about how wonderful NFTs are.

Maybe you should consider that this massive insecurity you seem to be showing is a sign that you know or fear deep down that it's not all it's hyped up to be.   Most criticism in the world is right and repeating that sometimes similar sounding criticism was wrong -- doesn't change this.

In any case, if you want to work yourself into a foam about some grand idea that I think is a bunch of hokum-- knock yourself out!  People get off on all kinds of weird stuff, ... whips, chains, dressing up as sexualized foxes---- who am I to judge?  I suppose blockchain fetishism is no different.

Maybe I'm right, maybe I'm wrong-- it's not really anyone's concern but mine one way or the other.

Some here, however, may find it eye opening that I was able to simply paint the list of highest priced fNFT to list whatever I wanted it to list.  (I contemplated trading merit for the service of making other people's NFT's very "valuable", but I didn't want to irritate theymos. )

Had Theymos had a tracker for total value transacted up or transaction volume, I could have painted those just as easily.  The same applies to other systems, not just joke ones. You can't credibly do this with liquid fungible assets: I couldn't make everyone think the price of BTC was $10m/BTC today or whatever.  Non-fungibility is not very compatible with transparent market pricing.  Does that mean that the idea is useless? No (at least not for that reason ) -- but it's something people should keep in mind.  A lot of the liberating power of markets depends on the general fungiblity of commodity goods.

The same issues exist in other systems but the actors have a lot of incentive to not be particularly frank about them, in that sense this joke system was extremely liberating.

Did you ever try it?   Did it get any or did my NFT sniping shell script one liner always beat it to the punch?  

Mine would have collected more if it hadn't had a bug for a while where it accidentally bought the item on the line ABOVE the good deal. DOH.

Theymos, thanks for the absolutely great fun!

I regret that I was asleep across the end so I didn't get a chance to liquidate more of my positions.  With the help of friends I got pretty far ahead without selling too much of myself!

But I thought the real lesson here was that the art was inside you the whole time?!?!

No, it won't.  The link had a session cookie in it and the forum tries to stop you from leaking it.

I'd like to draw your attention to a Belgian masterwork currently available on the books, the Enigmatic "Pieter Wuille-I".

Works by original masters such as this are exquisitely rare, even when they take the form of apparently banal craft such as pencil sketches, ephemera, or -I NFTs.  There are only two Pieter Wuille NFT currently known to exist.  With a laboratory certified forum origin of December 2010, these works are among the oldest on record.  There literally isn't a single person in our community that hasn't been touched by this artist's works.

The better known "Pieter Wuille-II" recently sold for 8600 fBTC, a record not only for a -II grade work, but (if we assume an exchange rate of $58,000 USD to fBTC) the record price for sale of any artistic work at any point in history.  Pieter Wuille-II is available again, this time for an asking price of 9001 fBTC, and while widely regarded as a bargain at that price it is-- none the less-- a price beyond even the wildest dreams of most collectors.

Pieter Wuille-I, with an asking price of 1000 fBTC, is an accessible way to get a lesser-known Pieter Wuille into your collection before the market recognizes its true value.

Pieter Wuille-I is a mixed media work composed of roman concrete, quartz crystals, and alpaca socks.

Like its flashier sibling, Pieter Wuille-I has a timeless sensibility, unorthodox wit, and a disarming silent dignity than cannot truly be captured by its asking price.  Through a genius application of null space Pieter Wuille-I engages in transformative dialog with its surroundings.

The current owner of this NFT-- known to many only as "sipa"-- is sometimes considered reclusive, like the work itself.  Sipa intends to use the proceeds to fund an expedition to the moon.

Man, kids these days, no respect for their elders.

https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/interview-with-nanotube-founder-of-the-bitcoin-otc-ircs-marketplace-on-bitcoin-multisigs-and-security/


Aww yiss, motherfucking free markets!!!


A big part of why NFT's exist is specifically to enable stuff like this-- money pass transactions, illiquid trades booked at arbitrary values, etc.  This crap about art is really 90% cover for money laundering, graft, and pump and dumps.

Sure, it might be fun to spend a couple bucks on a digital title to some art, but the millions (even hundreds of millions)-- being directed at NFTs is driven by motivations far less simple and clean.