What is it in the tx data that makes them invalid?

The part where optimal supply isn't left for the market to figure out.

Am I to take it you believe in some cases the mining market should be fixed by some third party? What would constitute an irrational mining market? Who should step in to fix it?

Sounds good to me! The old supply/demand dynamic, right?

Now, who should decide how much demand there is for tx?
Who should decide what the supply of tx is?

AlexGR: Who should decide what the fair price of a tx is?

At a quick glance, it seems hate is the default mental state of most commenters there, regardless of subject matter.

Self-moderation can also be done in, well, moderation. I sometimes create self-mod threads, and make it clear what will get deleted: trolling, spam, off-topic chatter and asshattery. If you go around censoring actual opinions, I expect word will get around pretty fast.

I can't speak for F2Pool, and don't even know if that announcement is genuine, but it's not so hard to think of why it might matter. For example, assume you're F2Pool and think the consensus agreement is a compromise you're not particularly keen on. You agree anyway since it's better to at least get something done and to mend some bridges between the confliciting sides. Then you find out that actually one of the sides doesn't endorse the consensus at all, so you're agreeing to a compromise you don't like for no good reason at all.

That would be a worryingly abnormal development.

Hey adam - don't like NLC's constant trolling? Remember how, when you made this thread, you turned self-moderation on?

All the income in the gox data above is listed as JPY. Does that mean they've already liquidated any BTC, that the BTC hasn't been sold but is still listed at the current exchange rate, or that the BTC isn't included in these numbers?

So, to sum up.
Yesterday's news: We have consensus!
Today's news: We don't have consensus, we have another split!

Oh well. At least the miners are taking action. They'll be the ones to decide how this goes, whatever the devs say. Hard to argue with hashpower.

shmadz: I'm not sure an algo change would improve the situation any. Everyone would have to rebuild their mining setups. Some honest miners would probably just quit, while a determined attacker might just find holding onto a majority of hashpower just got cheaper for them.

A fork, sure, but a fork to what? Short of changing the hashing algorithm, I don't see what's going to prevent a destructive miner from shitting all over the new fork, too.

So: double-spends for direct economic gain don't seem likely to be a huge problem. Miners disrupting the network for political reasons (or ransom, for that matter) seems like it could be an issue, but it's hard to estimate how likely such an attack would be.

Man, where do they find these writers? It seems this one doesn't have a clue what he's writing about. For example, " two different blockchain versions that are incompatible with each other" isn't something a hard fork can result in, it's the definition of a hard fork.

You're about 5 years too late. Too many people have been scammed by their Bitcoin business partners by now for anyone to risk going into business with a random newbie.

Shmadz, BJA: to comment on double spend risks. You both seem to have missed some details.


If you have 75% of the hashrate, your success rate with double-spends is 100%, since you are guaranteed to be building the longest chain. Sure, 25% of the blocks will not be built by you, but you have the power to discard those from the blockchain. I'd guess a double-spend in this kind of scenario would probably be best achieved by willingly orphaning the blocks containing the tx  you want to re-spend. So the situation, if you assume Chinese miners are all in collusion, is actually worse than BJA is saying.

OTOH, honest miners aren't the only protection against double spends. simple race attacks can be detected by any sufficiently connected node. That won't help against dishonest miners, but the kind of attack a majority miner could pull off seems pretty problematic in terms of financial gains. The attack would be detected too quickly for the miner to exchange their BTC for other assets and take delivery of said assets, so any profits would be counted in BTC. And what do yout think happens to the BTC price if a majority miner goes rogue?

I believe that number is tx cost to the network as aggregate, which is basically (tx fees + block subsidy)/[# of tx] * [BTCUSD rate]. Cost to mine a block is a different issue, but would be harder to put a number to, since it depends on unknown variables.

Maybe this bickering has gone on long enough? Obviously no agreement can be found, all that's left is to see what measures the miners adopt. I expect we'll know more about that when the 2016 halving takes effect, or some time after that. The subsidy being cut in half will put the miners on the spot - either they'll take the small-blocks bet that a controlled amount of transactions will lead to bigger profits for them, or they'll take the big-block bet that more tx is better even if the average tx fee is lower. Until then... Let's watch some walls, huh?

That would depend on what problem you see being addressed. To me, neither Classic nor Core are proposing the right solution, although Classic's direction seems better. This is because, IMO, deciding the amount and types of transactions to include in blocks should be left to the people bearing the costs of running the network: miners and nodes. Bitcoin was set up to be a free market experiment from the get go and the blocksize cap was, at best, a distasteful short-term compromise. Central planning doesn't fit here.