Shaun Bridges and Co ?

  That one is funny 

This is how I see BU too.  The problem is that if you run core software, you automatically vote for changes (at least, I think there's no option you can switch on or off for changes like segwit - I may be wrong on that), so you need to run "something else" if you don't want to signal for segwit.

But is anybody really thinking that BU is anything else but an "I don't want Segwit" thing, in other words "I want to keep bitcoin exactly as it is, but I want to make you think that I want also a "solution" for crashing the lucrative fee market" ?

The question is even, whether a coin, looking to serve privacy, needs to be "mass adopted".  I would think it is better if not.  Of course, you need some market cap for sure, but this is now largely sufficient for those needing to do private transactions amongst them I'd think.  And honestly, if you can't handle a CLI, then maybe "private transactions on the internet" is not something you should consider in the first place.

Of course, an opposite argument is, the more people use it, the more "anonymity set" you get.  But also the more attention you get, the more silly "demand for regulation" you get from disgruntled idiots using it not for matters of privacy, and, worst case, traders wanting it to be as regularized as possible in order for them to be able to use it as much in finance as a gamblers' token as they can.

It is not because I won't explain 20 more times where most of your arguments are not rebuttals of what I write, that you must qualify my points as lies.  BTW, I'm perfectly capable of recognizing when you are right:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1884292.0

I told you many times my way of using this forum: posting my understanding at a certain point of things in a rather strongly affirmative way, and see if this can provoke sensible arguments made against it, that may improve my understanding of things. That's your and all other forum participant's only use for me. Your replies, apart from the thread I quote above, didn't reach the level of pertinence needed for me to learn from it, this is why I stop discussing those points, which were running in circles.  I wasn't winning anything from them.  And as I believe in free speech, I don't like self-moderated threads, even though I may inadvertently post in some by mistake.  Until recently, I didn't pay attention to that, but since Lauda censored me, I now do.

PS: as to "insults and arrogance" I don't think I will ever reach your level of mastership and its utility escapes me.  I don't remember often insulting people, because that is not going to increase their productivity of answers for me in most cases, so why would I do that ?  Can you show me a lot of insults on my part, because I don't really want to do that.

What I highlighted in your post from back then is a fundamental observation on your part I think.  But it would normally also lead to sufficient distributed antagonism so that no important changes can ever happen to the protocol.   The fact that there is now this immense pressure for segwit and LN means that this got centralized, no ? (in other words, that a non-immutable colluding consensus over change has been found, and obviously under the "leadership" of one or a few colluding entities pushing for it).
 

I thought that was more or less established, so I took that for granted.  But as I said, my argument was not so much for asic boost by itself (I only looked at the theoretical calculation scheme without imagining that its hardware implementation would be seriously different from the standard way of doing so, as I said, i took that for granted), my argument was this:

"IF you consider asic boost such a phenomenal gain in efficiency that one could call it "an exploit" or "cheating" or whatever, THEN it is entirely wrong to stop miners from using it, because its mere existence lowers PoW security"

Note that the "if ... then ..." is also correct when applied to "if false, then false".

This thread was nothing else but a reaction to my argument being censored by people claiming that asic boost is an exploit and should not be used by miners, as it "lowered proof of work".  In as much as technically, asic boost is not doing anything, then it is not an exploit, and in as much as it does, then it should be used.  

As I said, I took for granted that the gain was of the order of 20%, because that's the amount of raw calculations that one has to do less. I didn't consider that there were technical problems in realizing this, but that doesn't alter the argument that or it is insignificant (and then there's no reason to accuse those trying to implement it to cheat or to exploit) OR it is significant (and then my argument is that it should be used by all means).


Your argument probably makes sense - as I said, I took the 20% gain for granted and established.


I initially thought that your argument was that for two different chip designs with *identical drop out*, as I considered the two designs of comparable difficulty (which, as you line out, may not be the case), it is not because their dropout percentages are higher than the difference in performance, that this difference in performance is negligible.   But this was apparently not the argument you were making, so my "rebuttal" was targetting a mis-understood point (I misunderstood your initial argument).

I didn't realize that the design of an asic boost circuit was more difficult than a design of the normal system, as people were shouting about accusations of a (established, in my mind) 20% increase in efficiency.

The point is that this entire technical hardware discussion doesn't matter for the point I was making: *in as much as* asic boost is any kind of significant boost, it should be used.  In as much as it isn't, it is also not "an exploit" "a cheat" or whatever other accusations it took.

At least your keys are safe

The main option, if you don't want to hand over your private keys and secure your coins, is to be always able to kill yourself instantly (say, by having a poison pill in one of your teeth or so).  This secures your keys.

This is why non-anonymous crypto is fundamentally flawed, because you transfer the danger of getting stolen, into the danger of getting tortured, if the knowledge of your possessing crypto is public.

Indeed, a collectible can never be stable value money.  So "regulated" probably means that one can change the emission scheme (the 21 million coins) by a centralized "miner" authority, and that one can also destroy coins. 

But this could also be established in another way, if a central authority lay its hands on, say 99.999% of the bitcoin supply, and only issued very very small quantities of it, it could still, with a given, fixed supply, regulate emission and hence offer, so that it meets demand at a given price.

To @iamnotback (now BitNet):

I'm not going to reply again to your erroneous "rebuttals" of my arguments, but there was one point you made which is very pertinent, and where I learned something (at last) from those discussions:


This, I recognise, is smart, and I didn't think of the fact that a hashed *public* key, can also serve as a (symmetric) *secret* key in a hash-based signature scheme, without any asymmetric cryptography.  

That doesn't alter much of what I said about the clumsiness of the way that most of the crypto in bitcoin is implemented, where your "rebuttals" (often mixed with insults) weren't of sufficient pertinence for me to consider that they countered much, on the contrary. I'm going to stop discussing that, because after having explained several times, in too long posts, exactly what I meant, you don't seem to put any effort in it to understand them and eventually to point out where I might make mistakes - apart from the smart point you made here above.  As I'm now convinced that psychologically you NEED Satoshi to be an evil genius, I know that there's not much rational discussion to be had further on that topic, which is a pity.  But in any case, thanks for the above point, I (finally) learned something.

As to the future of bitcoin, nobody really knows where it will go, I don't hold a very high opinion on it, and up to now - after having been seriously enthusiastic about it, nothing of significance has convinced me of the opposite, but then, prediction is difficult, especially if it concerns the future, and of course, I can be totally wrong about that.

It is always linked to a real identity when doing a deal (trading on an exchange, buying physical goods, ... ).  The problem with transparent ledgers is that this information propagates from transaction to transaction.  On an obfuscated ledger such as monero or ZEC, the knowledge that you bought coffee and got a change so the coffee shop owner knows who you are (the one buying coffee) and to whom belongs the change address, is not linked to how you use that change (say, for buying some pornography).  On a public ledger, that is traceable.

That's more or less it.  But it wasn't kept secret, it was published in 2016.  Now, what miners put in their devices, or what their manufacturers put in their devices is their affair, no ?  

That said, I have my doubts that mining is a 1% margin affair   It wouldn't be worth it.  Too few return on investment.  Better go to the stock market instead of buying mining equipment, no ?

So your stance is that 20% more or less efficiency doesn't matter in the electronics industry.  I have my doubts about that.  As I told you already, I think you are confusing the standard deviation on an individual chip, and the fact that the average over a lot of them, shifts.

I would agree with you that if the technique, used to gain 20% more efficiency, would INCREASE the dropout rate by 20% or more, then, yes, this is not a good idea.  But if you get the same per-wafer dropout (even if it is 20%), and your *average* efficiency increases by 20%, that's something that, in most competitive markets, wouldn't be neglected, I'm sure.  If all else equal, there's no reason NOT to profit from 20% more efficiency.

As far as I understood, it is the *calculation* that was patented, not an asic design.  A bit like the RSA calculation scheme had a patent on it for years.

It is just a somewhat smarter way of organizing the calculations for the "proof of work", by allowing to re-use of some results.  There's actually nothing special about it.  But the thing is that its discoverer, of Core, filed a patent for it (= the calculational scheme) and apparently, the main ASIC miner producer has incorporated it in his chips without asking for a licence, and can, or cannot, activate it with the right firmware.  
Now, people on the Core side accuse the miners using this, and the supplier of the ASICS, to organize, with these chips, an "outright attack on bitcoin" by "cheating" on the proof of work, and present one of the principal mining barons as a big cheater.


Well, the only potential problem is that a core guy has a pending patent on it.  

When I tried to explain technically that there was nothing special about ASIC boost to one of the core propagandists here accusing Ji I don't know of being an outright attacker on bitcoin, using an "exploit" that defied all competition, he censored me about that (it was a self-censored thread), meaning that he must have known that his argument didn't hold any water.    He got this thread as an effect.

The main argument was that asic boost was "an exploit" and "cheating" because it allowed to "show more work than one really did".  This is an argument that was also used on reddit, that asic boost was an "exploit" because it rendered the block chain insecure because people (miners) didn't really do the work they showed.  I simply argued that that reasoning didn't hold any water, and it is actually the opposite: it is not the effort by the block-adding miner that secures the chain, but the work NEEDED by the attacker that is the security of the chain.

Whether 20% or so more or less, makes a big difference, is an open question, but in as much as it is considered a terrible act of cheating by the Core defenders, it would also be a terrible loss in security by not using it.  And in as much as it doesn't matter much on one side, it doesn't matter much on the other side.

In other words, I just turned the Core defender logic upside down with the title of this thread: in as much as asic boost means something, by all means, it should be used for security reasons ; and in as much as it is no big deal, well, it is no big deal.

In general, patents on improved economical efficiency of hash calculations are a serious danger to the cryptographic security of bitcoin, because in as much as these patents don't allow all miners to profit from the improvement, they can secure the chain with less proof of work than an attacker (of course not caring about licenses) now has potential technology to overcome it.  

Whether 15-25% efficiency improvement is an actual issue, I leave in the middle.  

You do understand that the propaganda was coming from the side that claimed to be a victim, right ?
But I agree with you that such a scheme is hardly going to hold up in court, as I outlined: it is too close, in my opinion, to standard techniques of key schedule re-usage.

You seem to confuse "average" and "standard deviation".   You could just as well say that mining with a higher efficiency doesn't make any sense, because the standard deviation on what you are doing is of the same order than your efficiency (for a Poissonian stream).  This is not true of course, because ON AVERAGE you win more, even though your fluctuations are larger than the gain.

Suppose that you win, on average, 10% of the blocks (you have 10% of the total hash rate).   It means you have a probability of 0.1 to win a block.   The standard deviation of "winning one block" is also 10%.  You might say that upping my hash rate from 10 to 15% doesn't make much sense, because the 5% extra is smaller than the variation of my single process chance, 10%.   But of course, in the long term, my revenue has increased with 50% !

BTW, I already explained why I "explain" stuff here: I write out my proper understanding of the thing, and look at the technical arguments against it, to learn from it, which is the sole reason why I am here.

 

I wouldn't say so.  My opinion that bitcoin's economic parameters (number of coins, emission scheme, and now also block size because the scarcity feeding the fee market) are immutable is empirically confirmed since 2013, and even since 2010, when the first attempts at changing it started, and especially since 2015 when the heated debate started.