Why the hell do you keep talking about ducks???

Let me understand ... The member of F2Pool which is an Antpool plant, sees that F2Pool has a block (F2Pool sends an update message containing a hash) and immediately transmits the particulars (the hash) to Antpool, at the same time that F2Pool starts mining on the new hash.  

Now, we suppose that F2Pool sets an "SPV trap" by occasionally announcing a bogus hash. So all of their members (including the Antpool plant) switch to mining on the new hash - along with all the members of Antpool.  

Now F2Pool and Antpool are both mining on a bogus hash and losing money.  The difference is F2Pool knows the hash is bogus.  It wants to switch its miners back to mining on the real hash.

How does it do that without tipping off whichever of its members are Antpool plants?

Hah.  We're not going to get an ice age, mini or otherwise.  We're already at a greater increase over baseline than a Maunder Minimum can reduce.  Even if we did, a Maunder minimum isn't planetary ice sheets; it's freezing waters in the Thames and a partial restoration of the polar caps.


No, you're right.  The planet will be here.  We can't kill earth, I don't think, at least not yet.  Nature will go right on adapting in a hot, mostly-depleted biosphere, producing everything from new species of grass and lizards to mosses and fungus, to maybe giant bats and things.   What we can do though, is make Earth into an environment that will necessarily go on without us because it isn't a suitable environment for humans any more. 

So what it's about, and always has been about, isn't saving the planet - it's saving the Humans.

a 7900 bitcoin transaction just went by on my node (in block 364916).

That's like, eight slices of Laszlo's pizza.


I think I'm going to propose "Slice of Laszlo's pizza" as a synonym for KiloBTC for the next version of the client.

In simple terms, the bitcoin network cannot handle more than a certain volume of transactions every hour.  This is in general a result of the system only producing one 'block' on average every ten minutes, and each 'block' containing only 1 Megabyte of space for transactions. 

This so-called "attack" consists of someone creating more than that number of transactions per hour.  The result is that transactions go into the "memory pool" - the set of transactions not yet included in a block - instead of getting quickly included in blocks.  And transactions in the memory pool get kicked out of the pool when the server running that node runs out of memory.  It's very probabilistic, but if your transaction stays in the memory pool long enough (days or weeks) it will probably get kicked out of everywhere and then it will never go through at all.

So if you make a transaction now, your transaction is in danger of going into the memory pool and staying there a long time, or maybe even getting dropped, because right now the memory pool is big enough to keep making blocks for 18 hours not even counting the usual transaction volume. 

If your transaction gets dropped, it'll be like it never happened - the coins will go back to the sender's wallet.

That means that if someone is sending you coins you need to be sure of some confirmations before you give them whatever they're paying for.  Confirmations mean that the transaction actually got into a block and became part of the permanent record of Bitcoin.

And if you're sending someone coins, and don't want to wait days for them to get confirmations and send you the stuff you're paying for, you need to cut in front of all these little transactions, by setting your transaction fees a little higher than those transactions are setting them.  Just a tiny bit (like an extra USAmerican penny) will do it.

Wow.  A 7900 bitcoin transaction just went by on my node.  Holy cow.  That's like, eight slices of Laszlo's pizza.

Anyway, the people making these transactions are paying transaction fees - which means they're paying the miners (a little bit) to include these transactions in the blocks that are being made.  So far they've committed $30K dollars to doing this.  The transactions will therefore stop when they either run out of money, accomplish whatever they're trying to do, or conclusively fail to accomplish whatever they're trying to do.

Anyway, it's not a good reason to start using altcoins.  At least I don't think it is.  It's just something that means that for as long as it lasts a bitcoin transaction will cost you an extra penny or so in fees.

Oh, yes, I will be the first to acknowledge that USA's current educational system is an utter piece of crap. 

It seems to be the first thing gutted when money is needed elsewhere, the thing most inconsistently supported, and the thing subject to absolutely the worst planning and analysis in the US government (except for perhaps the SEC).  Most damning of all, it is terribly ineffective.  US graduates are generally lower in quality of learning than people who attended school in the third world, and completely inadequate for the personnel needs of our own high-tech businesses. 

We can examine school systems from all over the world of that actually work. We should use that information to fix our own.  But we don't.  Education in the US has been the victim of many different idiots with "solutions" that are simple, easy to talk about, and wrong.

For what it's worth, I'm running a bitcoin full node on a server with 64G RAM memory, at 173.228.13.5, at the usual port.

Because of massive memory, and the fact that I invoked it with maxorphantx=10000, it's not dumping tx out of its mempool. Because I invoked it with maxconnections=500 and at the moment only am connected to 50 peers, there's plenty of room for you if you'd like to connect and "not lose track" of all the transactions.

At this moment I'm showing 184Mbytes of unconfirmed transactions - amounting to 74563 tx.

If I were doing an alt, I would allow anyone who mined a block to collect the coins from the oldest addresses, up to 0.0001%, rounding up, of the UTXO in blocks older than 5 years. 

This should never and will never be part of Bitcoin because it violates Bitcoin's fundamental protocol and the basic prospectus under which Bitcoin users acquired their coins.

But it would be a good rule if it had been that way from the outset, because it would reduce the uncertainty over how many coins are lost and thereby improve the accuracy of economic modeling and forecasting and the efficiency of markets.  Under that model, in the long run no coins would be lost.

Because they are not traceable through the block chain.  Every bitcoin you spend gets linked through the block chain to where you got it, and usually to other coins you had in your wallet at the time and where you got them.  It's pretty easy to analyze how you use bitcoin and see your past transactions, if you start with a single address of known ownership.

But if you buy a private key from someone, the coins do not move on the block chain.  If they are freshly mined coins, they have no history to link to anything whatsoever.  So they can be spent, carefully, without being linked to any of your previous or future purchases or spends on the block chain.

The buyer immediately transfers the coins to his own private key so that the seller can't spend them, but as far as block chain analysis can tell, it's still not linked to anything else the buyer has.

Politics is unproductive here.

My problem with the current crop of "libertarians" is that they're advocating fundamentally unproductive stuff like destroying public infrastructure.  There's a lot of stuff that's cheaper and more efficient when provided by government, (like roads), and there's a lot of stuff that can't be provided by private firms because other private firms will fuck it up (like clean air and soil) and there's a lot of stuff that supports the economy at large in the long term but does not support any particular private company so private companies won't do it (like universal, USEFUL education). 

My problem with anarchists is that anarchy is merely a transitory state that is a prelude to warlords and petty criminal organizations taking over.  Much larger criminal organizations with subordinate warlords are much more efficient and less dangerous for the population, and eventually start to look like governments that provide actual services - but they take generations to evolve from the first generation of thugs that take over from an anarchy.

Hell no I don't mean unlucky.  If we get a mini ice age starting in about a decade or so and it more-or-less cancels out AGW?  That would be the best luck we could possibly have.

A planet where most of us can survive is a far far better thing than a planet where most of us can't, and if we don't get a break like a Maunder Minimum, we're going to get a planet where most of us can't.

If we manage to run out of fossil fools before it's over, so much the better - it removes one of the means by which we'd otherwise probably go on to fuck it up again.

One possibility is that the current "stress test" is being done by holders in order to pump their coins before a sell. 

As I write this my unconfirmed transaction pool is 73086 tx, or 182 Mbytes of transactions. 

Bitcoin at default rates, if every miner filled up every block to the 1Mbyte limit, could clear that in a bit over 18 hours - though it would easily take 36 given a "normal" number of tx in addition to the backlog.

As far as I'm concerned we can't get that 20Mbyte limit in place fast enough.

That would be incredibly lucky - a once-in-four-centuries event happening exactly when AGW puts us in most dire need of it. 

Still, let's all hope they're right.  It would be awesome to run out of fossil fuels, and maybe even get a survivable colony or two into space, before frying the planet or producing an environment here in which we cannot survive. 

I don't think the fifty years or so of a Maunder Minimum is quite enough time for that to happen though given that extraction technology is getting so much more effective though.  If they're right and one is coming, we'll find out.

Alternatively this could be someone trying to prevent a (VERY LARGE) zero-conf transaction from getting into the block chain.   By design that attack shouldn't work, because a VERY LARGE transaction would inevitably rise in priority during a single day until it were included in the "freebie" section.  That is, in fact, why Satoshi put a freebie section in the block composition code in the first place.

But now that we have a bunch of miners ignoring the freebie section, sellers are at least theoretically vulnerable to it.  Which, essentially, means the advice about always waiting for at least a couple confirmations is essential.

Cryddit

I note that this "stress test" coincides with a rise in price and an increase in "buy" volumes on major exchanges.  

Amid all the digital dust caused by unconfirmed transactions, someone (or more likely someseveral) is buying massive amounts of bitcoin.

I wonder if the current "attack" is being done by (or on behalf of) big buyers.  It would be intended to occupy the news and speculation while a move that would otherwise set off a more major price spike gets executed.  Pure conspiracy theory, of course.

Note:  As I write this my memory pool shows 74,581 unconfirmed transactions, which is 181 megabytes of backlog.

My Grandma Beryl used to say of someone extraordinarily foolish,

"I swear that boy could get hit twice by the same bolt of lightning!"

But she wasn't talking about odds, she was talking about stupidity and failure to learn from a past mistake.

And my Grandpa Charlie?  Her husband?  He actually *DID* get hit by lightning, once, before they married.  But he wasn't a stupid boy; he quit fixing barbed-wire fences when rainstorms were moving in, and never got hit again.

Similarly, people who got hit by address collisions and learned to stop using the native Android RNG without initialization, never got hit again.

So, yeah, lightning strikes occasionally.  It even strikes many times in very predictable spots that stick up high enough and are topped with shiny pointy well-grounded conductors.  You have to learn to NOT STAND on those spots!

Yes.

The behavior of a normal client when confronted with an invalid block, is to ignore it.  It will not relay that block.

Therefore, when BTCNuggets comes up with its version=2 block at a moment when the rest of the network is ready to reject version=2 blocks, the 'incognito' node that steals the hash by pretending to be a member of BTCNuggets will hear about it - but the block itself WON'T be relayed through the network to BTC-China, because other network nodes will notice it's invalid and drop it on the floor rather than relaying it.

So here's the situation.  They want to check "in parallel when the block arrives" but the block won't arrive at all unless the same check, as performed by the relaying node, succeeded!  Every second you don't get that block, it becomes more likely that the reason you haven't is because it's invalid.

So mining on a hash while waiting for a block is not a plan to maximize profits if it goes on for more than about ten seconds. If you haven't seen the block by about ten seconds after getting the hash, then it's most likely because that block was the Pravda, not the Truth.  Nodes that would otherwise have relayed it to you (and everybody else) had a look at it and laughed at the funny joke instead of finding news worth passing along.  And what that means is that if you treat the hash as True rather than Pravda, you're going to get taken in along with the other optimists who believed in it - and like them, you will believe you are wealthier than you'll actually be.

I hesitate to bring this up because people are mistaken about how, but the forks do in fact contribute to delays.

When you've got 50% of the hashing power working on a bad fork, you've only got 50% of the hashing power working on a good fork.  While this situation is in effect, you can only form about 50% of the "nominal" number of blocks in the good fork.

That leaves only room for 50% of the normal number of transactions and the remainder do in fact start to pile up when they come in faster than the reduced-capacity good block chain can handle.