If decreasing the reward time results in an increase in orphaned blocks how have alt coins that have a quicker reward time (such as LiteCoin) handled the problem or have they?
They are "handling" the problem because their blocks are practically empty / trending much closer to 0kb rather than 1000kb. |
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So if Evan or the decentralized budget, issued a bounty for third parties to break InstantX, would you break it or would you say "oh, but we don't have the X million dollars required to buy the necessary amount of masternodes that are necessary for our attack to work"?
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In the finance world if you say "my company transacted 1bn USD last year and 5bn USD this year and I'm expecting 20bn USD in 2 years", that kind'a counts for growth you know. Just sayin'.
Yeah, but if you cant make a bank transfer for $100m, you dont simply go back and make one for $200m so it will go through. The idea that people will transfer more money because they cant transfer less is ludicrous. I mean, seriously? The concept is that you are dropping 5000 satoshi transactions for 50.000 or 500.000 satoshi or 5m satoshi txs - for as long as the network can't handle every one of them (there will be a day when that becomes a reality). Check this guy out: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1329174.0"Oh and I don't want to pay fees"  |
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+ there are two dimensions in growth, one being the money volume the other being tx count. Money volume will continue to increase and scale even with a steady tx count as very low value txs give their place to higher value txs in a "crowded" scenario.
 While it is true that the tracks don't suffer from as much wear when it's upside down, there are other issues with this way of thinking. In the finance world if you say "my company transacted 1bn USD last year and 5bn USD this year and I'm expecting 20bn USD in 2 years", that kind'a counts for growth you know. Just sayin'. |
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An Open Letter from Sam Cole (CEO of KNC Miner)
Post reputation: 4 Quote
Fri Jan 15, 2016 4:49 pm
Sam Cole, CEO of KNC wrote:
All.
...
The issue is by doing nothing we are actually forcing it to stop growing and stay where it is.
...
Thanks,
Sam
Med vänlig hälsning | Best regards
Sam Cole
KnC ... To put it in plane language... I don't know what has to be done, but I feel something has to be done. So, let us do what we can do, ruin bitcoin by granting free space to every spammer on the blockchain. + the fact that there is no expansion space is a bullshit argument. Blocks are at ~600kb (including dust and spam), not 1mb. It has +50% capacity to reach 900kb - with 100kb to spare. If some blocks are full, so be it... + there are two dimensions in growth, one being the money volume the other being tx count. Money volume will continue to increase and scale even with a steady tx count as very low value txs give their place to higher value txs in a "crowded" scenario. |
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Hacked is not the correct word here, the network was attacked. From what I understand you got forked due to bad code in your newest client - which was exploited (?). I remember the days when Monero guys were joking about DRK's forks  Also, if you want to know the details:
the attacker found a small bug in the new 0.9 release that made it possible to create v2 blocks before the network was scheduled to do the planned hardfork.
Small? It can't be that "small" if an attacker can fork the network with it. |
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Burn, Baby. Burn.
There is no guarantee Bitcoin can be saved, but in CANNOT be saved without a crash that wakes up everyone to the threat of the smallblockers.
Fuckin' smallblocker Satoshi who didn't realize that dust/spam payments aren't practical... Bitcoin isn't currently practical for very small micropayments. Not for things like pay per search or per page view without an aggregating mechanism, not things needing to pay less than 0.01. The dust spam limit is a first try at intentionally trying to prevent overly small micropayments like that.
Bitcoin is practical for smaller transactions than are practical with existing payment methods. Small enough to include what you might call the top of the micropayment range. But it doesn't claim to be practical for arbitrarily small micropayments.
Forgot to add the good part about micropayments. While I don't think Bitcoin is practical for smaller micropayments right now, it will eventually be as storage and bandwidth costs continue to fall. If Bitcoin catches on on a big scale, it may already be the case by that time. Another way they can become more practical is if I implement client-only mode and the number of network nodes consolidates into a smaller number of professional server farms. Whatever size micropayments you need will eventually be practical. I think in 5 or 10 years, the bandwidth and storage will seem trivial.
I am not claiming that the network is impervious to DoS attack. I think most P2P networks can be DoS attacked in numerous ways. (On a side note, I read that the record companies would like to DoS all the file sharing networks, but they don't want to break the anti-hacking/anti-abuse laws.)
If we started getting DoS attacked with loads of wasted transactions back and forth, you would need to start paying a 0.01 minimum transaction fee. 0.1.5 actually had an option to set that, but I took it out to reduce confusion. Free transactions are nice and we can keep it that way if people don't abuse them.
It would be nice to keep the blk*.dat files small as long as we can.
The eventual solution will be to not care how big it gets.
But for now, while it's still small, it's nice to keep it small so new users can get going faster. When I eventually implement client-only mode, that won't matter much anymore.
There's more work to do on transaction fees. In the event of a flood, you would still be able to jump the queue and get your transactions into the next block by paying a 0.01 transaction fee.
Blocks are full with spam/dust => "oh no the end of the world is coming", yet the predicted design to bump fees and bypass the spam is working as it should (with less fees - as value per BTC has increased). All the arguments about the good anti-core forkers who want the best for the small guy so that he can make micropayments for free / almost free against the "evil blockstream employees" seem to go out the window in light of what Satoshi himself said about the design. It seems Satoshi was of the belief that eventually technological resources will be boosted to a level that the existing design can scale even for micropayments, when currently it can't. What he expected is 100% probable (give it a few decades at most and VISA-like tx capability will be easy), however I suspect he was expecting some kind of non-linear breakthrough sometime soon - that hasn't yet been invented (?) or mass implemented as of today. He was also of the opinion that there is no need for the blockchain to be bloated and his preference was to keep it relatively small, in order to boost adoption and prevent centralization. He offered an alternative "design" where a much more centralized bitcoin with nodes in server farms could take over and people would be running light clients. People just repeating "big blocks" remind me of the movie Idiocracy with the "electrolytes". |
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Wow - It's certainly a good attempt at telling the truth. The only thing I can't compute is how you can keep a business running for 18 months after a 'theft' on such a scale... By selling 400k dash and other alts, perhaps. Maybe that's why dash withdrawals were fragmented and coming in pieces. They had exhausted the dash supply to pay out btcs and ltcs. |
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IIRC 22 Feb '14 was around the time when Cryptsy introduced DASH (amidst the ccex hack aftermath chaos) so possibly a market player moving to the new, larger exchange (up to then it was ccex + poloniex). There wasn't any mixing capability back then, DarkSend came later (a few months). |
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Second, it definitely looks like Bitcoin Core is, ironically, 'going corporate' (in fact let's just call it Bitcoin Core-porate). Both the refusal to raise the block size and the introduction of RBF point to the obvious: tiny transactions like buying a soda with Bitcoin are going to be off limits, and very soon. The little guy is getting kicked off the Bitcoin network, and only major operators like Coinbase, BitPay, and large banking institutions will be allowed to play on the block chain.
At least, the Bitcoin block chain.
There is no available solution in any crypto that I am aware of, that solves the problem related to blockchain abuse and fees. If you allow near zero fees or zero fees, what's to stop someone from flooding the blockchain and network with bogus transactions? The last line of defense are the miners who will opt to not process cheap transactions (which would also increase their risk of getting orphaned) and "centralized" decisions by devs to increase fees to counteract the spamming. If tomorrow morning DASH gets a spam attack, like Monero had some time ago (presumably from Bytecoin?), we would be ...hard forking overnight to increase fees. The system right now works in a wishful-thinking kind of way that it won't be abused, or if it is abused it is understood that the "centralized" dev team can promptly react to solve the issue by making the attack more expensive. Systems like BTC, DASH etc must be built taking into account worst-case scenarios. Additionally, the end-game scenario is always about paying fees when block reward goes down a lot. BTC is much closer to end-game (it has produced 15mn+ coins compared to DASH's 6) than we are, so fees should play a larger role. |
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So hacker takes BTC & LTC from craptsy, craptsy sells DRKs to compensate in order to allow BTC & LTC withdrawals. So we have a lot of downward pressure in DRK, for all the time craptsy was selling, and a lot of price suppression due to all the DRK/DASH dumps. This could be very good for DASH |
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That's no mic drop. A mic drop is a victorious action, taken only when your wordplay has been so devastatingly erudite that there is no possible way your opponent would embarrass himself by trying to follow it up. Mike's blog post is what is known colloquially as 'throwing in the towel'. "ragequit" in the modern urban net slang. That's the second time he ragequited after saying he had enough and will work for the banks I guess the powers that be needed him to re-quit in order to use the article that he wrote and spread it now that the other markets are failing... " See bitcoin has failed too"...says an ex-bitcoin dev, type of narrative. Cheap tricks that work. |
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I think it is a bit soon to give up on bitcoin. He's just too butthurt that his XT project failed...as it should have. |
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Announced masternode blinding - not delivered.
Announced on chain anon (ring sigs) - not delivered.
Those are two off the top of my head, but I'm sure there are others.
Regarding the bolded part, Q1, early Q2 of 2014, the situation with darksend was pretty basic. 10 DRKs inputs in threes, mixing while sending (and having to wait). The "V2" / second version would be a huge upgrade. Now for V2 there were 2 options of ring sigs and premixing+multiple rounds+multiple denominations (not only 10 DRKs). V2 delivered a radical upgrade through the second way. What was promised but has not yet been delivered: ip obfuscation* (there was talk about i2p in the masternode network IIRC) and more recently masternode blinding. IIRC masternode blinding coincided with some other wallet app and it would have to be rewritten or something - so the spec was kept stable. *One could argue that there is TOR compatibility. |
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Who is to say some Bitcoin devs won't fork bitcoin because they disagree on whether miners should allow free blocks or be forced to mine them, "as it was intended to".
Some will say "bitcoin miners are supposed to mine transactions / bitcoin will die if nobody mines txs / we can't pay ridiculous money to the mining cartel" and some will say "they should be free to choose / the market has to provide incentives to the miners (fees) in order to mine the txs".
Some miners who feel they can cope with the upgrade will be in favor - because that will put into a disadvantage their opponent miners, and some who have smaller "pipes" or worse propagation will probably reject it.
So the miners would be considering an advantage gained from having better resources than their competitors vs. cutting their own profits from fees, which, as block rewards continue to dwindle can only become a bigger issue for them. Sure, anyone could fork Bitcoin to force miners to accept feeless tx, or to force a pricepoint for tx. I don't recall any developer suggesting the transaction price needs to be fixed by policy, and I believe it would be a fool's errand anyway. You can't fight economic forces in a voluntary system like Bitcoin. You can try, but you'll just get out-competed. Actually, scratch thst: I do believe some developers are saying the transaction price point needs fixing - anyone proposing a blocksize limit as an economic measure is doing just that: tampering with price discovery. You could "sell" a fork attempt not by saying that you have to force miner fees. It's more "eloquent" to proclaim "doom" by all those bad miners who do not mine txs and how this deviates from the vision of Satoshi, who intended blocks with transactions - not series of empty blocks and a full mempool where transactions are stuck. See how better that sounds? |
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Yeah seems like blocks are full only from time to time, it's not a global phenomenon. So we won't see a problem in transaction yet!
OTOH, there were an extra four blocks that hour. We definitely aren't full yet though. But are we supposed to wait until it's a crisis before we do anything? No we are supposed to hard fork it, just because  |
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To cut a long story short, perhaps Mycelium doesn't do a good job with its fee estimations. But I do think it's a very good wallet in general. In the end what counts is the user experience. And mine is getting worse as the blocks fill up.
Probably wallet related, I guess. It needs a setting between normal and priority I guess. If it has a manual setting, try something in between the two prices. I always thought the idea was that growth in usage would compensate for the dwindling block subsidy. If not, the fees have to go up a lot (at least to a couple of dollars per tx).
It would, if adding blocks was without cpu and network costs for the miner. But it has a cost in the form of orphan risk when blocks are too large which will make it a rational decision for him to reject processing transactions. This can only be solved technically by improving the code to scale better in terms of cpu and network. Changing a setting from 1mb to 2mb or 10mb in the code, won't fix that fundamental scaling issue. The moments I experience delays concur with blocks being maxxed out. So at those times, it is a capacity problem.
More like incorrect fee, for the given load, problem... When someone released a lot of private keys with a few satoshis in them, the network was definitely at its max, but I could transact normally if I paid a normal fee. All that congestion was bullshit almost-free traffic that was easily bypassed by a fee. |
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Yes, because fees are too low for some miners to even bother. When you get 25 btc from block reward and 0.2-0.4 from tx fees, why would I even risk orphaning the block by taking longer to transmit my block finding? It's not worth it.
This is a problem that sooner or later will be understood by "large blockers" when the percentage of the miners not bothering to even mine transactions will increase dramatically. So when half the miners will mine the 2mb blocks, and it's an effective network capacity of 1mb, what then? We'll be asking for 10mb blocks? And what will change then, if miners still refuse to mine txs without the fees going up significantly?
If that happens, the fees will go up, because that's what the market has decided. As it should be. Will it? How about forking Bitcoin then? Who is to say some Bitcoin devs won't fork bitcoin because they disagree on whether miners should allow free blocks or be forced to mine them, "as it was intended to". Some will say " bitcoin miners are supposed to mine transactions / bitcoin will die if nobody mines txs / we can't pay ridiculous money to the mining cartel" and some will say " they should be free to choose / the market has to provide incentives to the miners (fees) in order to mine the txs". Some miners who feel they can cope with the upgrade will be in favor - because that will put into a disadvantage their opponent miners, and some who have smaller "pipes" or worse propagation will probably reject it. And there you have "fork wars episode #1337" Once you start eroding trust in the system that's what you get. From that perspective, Gavin and Hearn will be successful into destroying the robustness of the system and putting uncertainty into it with the xt and classic bullshit. All you need to do is apply some social engineering pressure to the ignorant masses (who cannot see all the factors involved in choices like these, because these choices are dependent on a whole sort of parameters that the outsider does not have the knowledge to properly evaluate) and break the system through the pressure involved. Bitcoin is under a social engineering "attack" right now, testing whether a power grab is possible through a pretentious technical dilemma that wasn't. The increase in tx capacity is a given and would be implemented anyway and it is definitely, as evidenced by the numbers, not a pressing issue to increase capacity by 4x or 8x (2mb / 4mb blocks) when avg block size for the last two weeks is a little higher than 0.5mb. The only question is whether that upgrade would be in a few weeks or months. |
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Of course, it's not about the average size per day (unless you say it's okay to wait a day for your transaction to be processed).
Yes, it is perfectly ok if I don't pay fees. Not all txs have the same urgency. Consolidating dust in my wallets is not the same as wanting to be included in the first block because I want to transfer money to an exchange *right now*. I can wait 10 blocks or 100 blocks for the dust, but I'll pay extra for the first block inclusion if I need it. It's about the occurrence of periods that the network is maxxed out. The more often these periods occur and the longer they last, the more degraded the user experience becomes, as I experienced myself a couple of times already.
It's just like the highway. You pay more for your own car, you go faster than the bus. You pay a cab, you go faster than the bus. If you want to go "economy", you keep your money and take the bus. And the size of blocks mined doesn't tell everything. There are regularly empty blocks, and sometimes miners don't fill up blocks despite plenty of tx waiting to be included. So not all available tx capacity is actually used by all miners.
Yes, because fees are too low for some miners to even bother. When you get 25 btc from block reward and 0.2-0.4 from tx fees, why would I even risk orphaning the block by taking longer to transmit my block finding? It's not worth it. This is a problem that sooner or later will be understood by "large blockers" when the percentage of the miners not bothering to even mine transactions will increase dramatically. So when half the miners will mine the 2mb blocks, and it's an effective network capacity of 1mb, what then? We'll be asking for 10mb blocks? And what will change then, if miners still refuse to mine txs without the fees going up significantly? In the end it's the user experience that matters, whether this is confirmation time or tx fee. If these goes down hill, usage will shrink, user adoption will stall. Stalling adaption will hurt the confidence of the users and ultimately the price of BTC.
At 0.5 - 0.7mb avg, we have plenty of space left. Obviously if some miners feel they don't want to mine almost free txs, that's not a capacity problem, but a broken-fee-model, in terms of the "customers" who want to transact for free or almost free, and some miners are like "yeah, ok, please go somewhere else for your free or cheap tx processing". |
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