=> As close as it gets: https://github.com/bitcoin-dot-org/bitcoin.org/pull/1165

I'll quote myself here in reference to a post in another thread:


Let's say tomorrow morning there are BTC crackdown operations and this creates a surge in demand for DASH by tens of thousands of BTC users.

Are we ready to give those people a combo package of trivially-easy-to-use anonymity that combines both the transaction part and the IP part (tor/i2p, etc)? If we don't have IP obfuscation embedded and out of the box with a few clicks of the mouse, from inside a GUI, it will be a disaster in terms of the ability to convert people's interest (which will be a given due to new needs arising) to immediate adoption.

You don't want the "customer" to leave because you are requesting him to do extra stuff that he has no time, knowledge or desire to do on his own. So give him a few checkboxes with IP obfuscation, slidebars with the level of security he likes and voila, DASH is much better positioned to "receive" people (=adoption). It is already the prime candidate due to marketcap position and existing adoption, plus the weaknesses of the competition (command line usage that most ordinary people won't go to), but this shouldn't be the "bar". The bar should be higher.

Nobody was interested in BTC prior to its spike either.

Wait until there is some random crackdown on BTC and then suddenly everyone is rushing to buy anon coins as a safe haven or diversification asset.

The message is going circles, originating from Monero.

1) Monero guy #1 with obsession against DASH, and vested interest in Monero's success / the failure of others, goes to Anonymint and tells him shit about DASH.

2) Anonymint repeats what Monero guy #1 told him - and we've often seen written by Monero guys in this thread.

3) Monero guy #2 quotes Anonymint who is already using and repeating Monero guy #1 propaganda. Thus Monero guys #1 and #2 exploit Anonymint, who made himself the unwilling pawn in the "forum battle" of Monero vs DASH.

Conclusion: Same old shit from Monero guys after the latest debacle involving threats against businesses that adopt DASH.

http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR1200/RR1231/RAND_RR1231.pdf

....
Put another way, Bitcoin is anonymous in
the following sense: It is as though every bank transaction and every
bank-account balance is known to anyone with an Internet connection;
the only information that is unknown is who owns each bank
account, something that can be inferred from user interactions.
Clearly, such “anonymity” is unacceptable for everyday economic
life, and therefore additional safeguards must be built in.28 For many (if
not most) existing VCs, including Bitcoin, the current process of maintaining
anonymity amounts to learning a degree of cyber-operational
security or “tradecraft,” which seems unrealistic for the layperson.
....
"It is difficult to evaluate the ultimate security (and usability) of
Zerocash, as it has not been tested in the crucible of real-world use
and evaluation, though its theoretical mechanisms have more rigorous
security proofs than virtually all existing VCs. By contrast, Dashcoin is
currently being used and seems to be reasonably anonymous (certainly
more so than using Bitcoin without additional privacy-enhancing technology),
though it has only been in existence for about a year as of this
writing; its current market capitalization much less than that of Bitcoin,
thus an equal comparison is difficult to make.4"



...I'm bolding the part of "tradecraft" and layperson because I'd really like to see out of the box anonymity in both the IP part and the transaction part. If you give the layperson an out-of-the-box anonymity, you are tapping a much broader audience than the geek crowd who can set up their own IP anonymity/obfuscation.

It is definitely destined to become big. However, the blockchain should not be treated like a dumpster.


It depends on the scaling parameters.


It's not unlikely that it will happen but at that point the centralization factor will have gone up ...a lot.


It's not me crying doom for 1MB blocksize and fee increases...


Not all miners behave the same way.


There's not much that a stress test can reveal that a script on a virtual testnet can't. And the second one won't have a lasting imprint on the blockchain.

I mean you know beforehand what will happen. If you start spamming, the blockchain size will start increasing, free txs will slow down a lot in their processing while those txs with fees will go through quickly.

Actually I'm concerned with far bigger attack vector implementations by "the powers that be". And the thing is, these guys are more dangerous than the average script kiddie because they also have money to pay for the tx fees. In that scenario you are fucked because they can do both bloating + tx crowding over the rest of the users, by paying more fees and rendering the network unusable. So you need much better solutions than increasing the blocksize (which will happen when it is necessary).


How many txs do you want it to handle per day?


All the bitcoin developers want Bitcoin to scale and there is 100% consensus on that. This practically guarantees it will happen, despite their differences on whether the blocksize should be raised now, raised temporarily (kicking the can), raised later, have something else done, etc etc.

The precise numbers on how scaling will go down on 5 years, 10 years, 20 years are pretty much unknown but that will not stop investments or businesses.

That's what it should look like when there are no "stress tests" / attacks, too much dust moving around etc. The ratio between crap and legitimate* txs is actually improving. When no attacks are ongoing and the crap is limited, we are usually peaking at around 500-550k per block (on average), otherwise it goes up to 800k (on average).

Personally I like to take some random samples during the day and check myself, I'm not using a specific chart for this, except this https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-block-size?timespan=30days&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address= for checking block usage.


* It is not necessary that a spammer should always be moving small amounts. He can also move larger amounts (if he has a large supply of Bitcoins) so that he can pretend that spam txs are "legit".

It's your table / your labels / your definitions so I don't mind really. I just needed some clarification because it was stated as fact that dash is ...spyware.

Bitcoin got mainstream attention around 2013. So the first 4 years were a bunch of nerds.


It's not bullshit. They can be served by the Bitcoin technology, perhaps in other blockchains. It's not necessary to have everything in just one blockchain. From what I've read I never got the impression that Satoshi was envisioning putting all kind of crap into the blockchain.


Since the scaling debate got larger with the XT fork drama, and especially after XT got no traction, price has gone up significantly. Most people (obviously not you) trust the the core devs will do the things that are right for the future of bitcoin. If there is a problem, they'll fix it or find a solution. They work their ass off to maintain it, evolve it, make it faster and allow it to scale better. It is illogical to even propose that they want to purposefully bury it and cripple it, so that years worth of work will go down the drain. If they have a disagreement, and if the matter isn't pressing (and in this case IT ISN'T, since 1MB blocks get full with junk), they can sort it out through dialogue and consensus.


That's the consensus, yes. Even the core devs have coins or vested interest in BTC. Why would they want their "child" to go down or be problematic? So far they are doing a pretty good job of maintaining order and introducing improvements, while also not breaking consensus. That's not as easy as it sounds.

OK, I missed that (just got to the thread), but Spyware, as a term, is something entirely different.

It's one thing to say that an obfuscation model could be vulnerable under XYZ circumstances with a probability of x% of that happening, and another thing altogether to say "spyware". This is sensationalist crap. Especially when the masternode model as is implemented right now can use multiple rounds of laundering where each round reduces the probability of that happening to an insanely low percentage.

Sybil attacks with those you are mixing with is a very overlooked -yet much weaker point- than masternodes being crooked. Pretending to be a mixing partner does not require NSA-level resources. Unfortunately, all mixing systems will have this problem to one degree or the other.

You are using a chart that has a hidden story behind it and pretend like that story doesn't even exist.

The hidden story is that most of the transactions there are bogus, spam, dust, very low to no-fee, etc.

So to get the true representation you must know the ratio of normal transactions vs the spam/dust transactions within the capacity limit.

What will actually happen is that the ratio of the quality of txs will shift internally, within the prescribed limit. So if you have something like half a million of txs per day as a limit, and you currently have just 100k normal transactions per day (with the other 100-150k being bogus/spam/dust), then you have a 5x margin to hit the actual limit, when dust/spam/attacks are priced out and become uneconomical to execute.

If you are always considering dust/spam/bogus/attack txs to be the same in quality, then you could have an increase to 2MB tomorrow morning and by tomorrow evening someone could be filling the extra mb with "stress test" junk txs. That would prove what? That "Bitcoin is at its limit"? Just because someone has filled the new TPD limit with another 500k bogus transactions? No. It would only prove that if your block size supply is much larger than block size demand, then you can have plenty of free riders in that space. And those free riders will be using that space irresponsibly. Why not, anyway, since they aren't paying much for doing so...

Where exactly is the "spyware" aspect of DASH located?

It's an open source project, so please, if possible, name of file and line of code...

Anonymint says at one point

"But then smooth explained to me that these altcoin market caps are all manipulated mirages. Then I transitioned from a gullible fool and I started to ponder the more likely truth about the altcoin arena being one big "mining the speculators" paradigm."

...too much company with the Monero guys proves corrosive.

Not really. If I can buy 1 BTC and move it indefinitely as 100mn transactions of 1 satoshi, back and forth, I'll be making millions of bogus transactions for nothing. I haven't bought that "right" to fuck the blockchain and the network, sorry.

I'm also aware that as we go into the future I will be paying more and more fees, because these will start to be the main source of income for miners, instead of the block reward. That's the specification, based on pretty well thought-out game theory to both distribute the monetary base and secure the network in the long run.


The miners will get their 21mn coins, whatever anyone does.


The 1MB limit is there for a veeeery long time. Did you came before or after this patch was applied? Surely Satoshi didn't envision "crippling" bitcoin with that patch, as you imply about cripplecoiners etc, but having several vulnerabilities open as a result of the no-limitation was not an option.

When there is a vulnerability and a security patch is issued, you don't just revert the patch if you haven't found an adequate solution to the problem. This is irresponsible.

What you are saying that some assholes came around and thought Bitcoin is more useful if less people use it, is simply not true. What actually happened is that G & H came along and started selling their "bigger is better" propaganda of "XT" and at around the same time some other assholes were doing "stress tests", exploiting all the unused 1MB space, for peanuts, and bloating the blockchain with bullshit. The proposed "solution" was to bypass the patch that was there to prevent the vulnerabilities that had been discovered, despite the fact that the transaction limit was still way below the limit (bogus transactions notwithstanding) under a pretense of false urgency (the question is why?). And they seem to have added some more crap to the XT fork as well that made people repulsed by it.

Anyway that's the story. What we need for the future is a way to scale better. A way that can support hundreds of tx/s without creating bloat and centralization. This can't be achieved with a plain block size increase. The devs know it, the devs of altcoins know it, quite a few people will be working on this for months or years to come. Until then we'll have to manage with a combination of increased fees and an increased blocksize to accommodate for a legitimate increase in transactions.

Parallel to that, the blockchain will continue to scale in terms of value transacted, whether the 1MB limit is raised in the short-term or mid-term. If you have, say, an average 1MB block worth 100.000 USD in transactions, by making better use of it (no dust/spam/bogus/stress txs) you could get 10x of value inside the same block, in terms of money transacted. So, over a year, with the example given (100k USD per block vs 1mn USD per block) you jump to 52bn USD transacted per year instead of 5.2bn. And you do that, with the exact same parameters of 1MB blocks.

This is the alternate dimension of scaling (=in terms of value) which we consider a given since BTC doesn't have any issues in dealing with it. You could be sending 50$ or 1bn with ease. So if you get to have less 0.05$ or 0.5$ txs and more 5$ or 50$, you still process way more money.

You'll be seeing this go higher and higher, irregardless of the block size: https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume-usd

Typically there are no big hubs or data centers, except in some cases where it makes sense due to a country being a hub for other nearby countries, so serving data regionally makes sense instead of connecting to Europe, the US, etc.

The reason is that developing countries can't get competitive rates for their connectivity. Cost per gbps is much higher than the west due to very low economies of scale. And that's also why some ISPs can give you, say, 100mbps connections and then tell you that you can't really use more than a few GBs per month for downloading (but you can use more for local sites, local ftp, local P2P use, etc - because that is traffic which at a national level is like an intranet and you are not paying Verizon or Level 3 to "feed you").

The few kilobytes indeed aren't a problem. Running a full node or syncing a blockchain that is, say, 100-200-500 GB or 2 TB will be prohibitive in cases where capping is an issue.

Not having cheap access to technology & bandwidth is a major contributing factor for this situation: https://bitnodes.21.co/

They have the incentive but they are not configured accordingly. Not all of them. That's why dust/spam/no-fee and "stress test" txs get processed.


The 1MB limit is definitely helping to prevent abuse. Otherwise the attack vector and the willing miners are there for exploitation in a 5MB, 10MB, 20MB block scenario.


I do not believe that BTC should stay at 1MB. If it was up to me, it would grow depending the actual organic growth of the network* and other considerations that have to do with security, centralization etc.

* by that I do not mean the number of transactions. This is a pretty useless metric if one can start issuing tens of thousands of txs.

Bullshit = not understanding the value of the blockchain and polluting it with dust and spam. But, IMO, miners carry a large responsibility for allowing the processing of such transactions which is not in anyone's long-term interest.


Sort of.


The bigger the blockchain, the more unusable and more centralized it becomes. The blockchain should grow to the degree that it has to (=legitimate transactions) and not a kilobyte more. Anything different is inefficient.

The blockchain is a valuable resource. If you treat it like a dumpster you are devaluing BTC.

Economic considerations should also be given for developing countries where bandwidth costs are high, as are imported technological goods like hard disks, ram and high end CPUs/mobos. The western world doesn't really understand the problem. Then again it doesn't even understand the value of BTC compared to soft currencies either. It came as a surprise to many to read how good BTC is performing against various global currencies. We are so fixated in dollar terms that we cannot fathom that, in some other country, BTC is actually higher than its ever been. Things that we take for granted (stable currencies, access to cheap IT stuff, access to cheap bandwidth) aren't really granted all over the planet - and especially there where bitcoin is needed most.

It will get included later. That's spam for zero cost.


You are using a 0.1 BTC+ example. At 4 tps x 60 secs x 10 minutes, you are talking about 240 BTC in fees per block and 34.560 BTC per day. This is absurd and we all say NO.

A while ago I was sitting in front of a block explorer seeing the transactions as they happened in real time, in USD terms... there were many 0.03, 0.07$ transactions etc. This is bullshit.


The blockchain got larger, syncing times got slower, the attack left a permanent imprint. And consequent attacks will do the same. And if we had 10x blocks, it could be 10x the effect.


Clogging of trash txs don't matter (in terms of quickly doing your legitimate tx). You skip them with a normal fee. Large blocks = no fee competition = attacker gets to bloat for free. FFS they already do that with 1MB blocks.

It is not "beyond you" to understand this. It is pretty elementary.

1. You can understand pretty well the concept of abuse.
2. You can understand that not 100% of humanity is dependable to behave in a good manner, 24/7/365.
3. If you leave the option of free and totally unrestrained use of the blockchain then it's just a matter of time before the blockchain is bloated to infinity by some script kiddie who creates some script and lets it run continuously and adds tens / hundreds of gigabytes of spam, "for the lulz"...
4. You can now fully grasp that fees and "limitations" are what prevent system abuse that would have already rendered BTC a swift death.
5. If you have a better solution for the problem at hand, please present it.

The question you pose is actually reversed: Who would actually be invested in a joke currency that a script kiddie can render it useless for the lolz?

Bitcoin Difficulty:   93,448,670,796
Estimated Next Difficulty:   108,638,161,991 (+16.25%)
Adjust time:   After 2016 Blocks, About 14.1 days

Price spiking