I'm more of the opinion that Bitcoin will succeed, provided that it does not fail, and that a misstep can easily be worse than doing nothing.
Intelligent people may disagree with this.
The question is, what more qualifies as "doing nothing": - Letting Bitcoin operate with constantly full blocks, which has never been done before, or
- Continuing to let Bitcoin operate with non-full blocks, effectively uncapped,* as it always has
?* Of course a large part of the debate is over whether the current hard cap is actually doing anything. So the appeal to conservatism implied by "doing nothing" just pushes the question back.Your question presumes omniscience thus it is not falsifiable. Junk science. It's a question of perspective. There is no correct answer to what "doing nothing" really means, but it's being used as an argumentative tactic among the block-increase skeptics. I'm simply pointing out that neither side has a clear-cut, definitive claim that they are the ones proposing "doing nothing" or "maintaining the status quo" or "taking the conservative position." |
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If/When an actual problem with capacity occurs everyone that I know of (except perhaps MP) is perfectly amenable to increasing capacity through simplistic block size increase methods. In that case, unlike today, it will be much more easy to gain the 'consensus' that Bitcoin needs. If so, then people can all take a chill pill and stop with the scaremongering on both sides. We're probably a lot closer to consensus than we think if the FUD is all cleared away. I expect we are far from 1MB being stifling, as long as the fee market works properly, and conversely I also suspect that the cap isn't really needed at all. But for the sake of conservatism and consensus, we should just keep moving up the cap modestly so that it stays similar to its usual position well above where it would be actually functioning as much of a cap. If problems arise on either the "fees too high" or "blocks too big" (or "spammers just use up all the extra space") side, we can make the necessary adjustments by either increasing the cap or getting the fee market working better. If we get both problems, we'll actually be in a double pinch and have to innovate our way out, but I don't think we're anywhere close to that even being a possibility yet. The debate now, assuming the FUD is wiped away, seems to come down to, "Is it better to hit too-high fees first, or too-big blocks first?" I can see the argument from an optimization perspective that too-high fees is smoother and results in more economization and innovation, but on the other hand if it starts to hinder adoption that would be self-defeating and could even reduce decentralization because people who otherwise would have adopted and run full nodes will turn away. I think from looking at how everyone is acting and reacting in this debate that it is clear people's opinions (even of most devs) will generally move away from any pain that develops, so I see no danger of Bitcoin being "stuck" or stonewalled into a position that is painful for anyone, at least until we get to the "double pinch" scenario above, where both full blocks and high fees are a problem, but again that should be way far in the future, where we really can likely rely on things like Lightning Network and whatever other alien tech exists then. TL;DR: Not worried. |
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Is it meant to be humorous that voting is described as arbitrary when compared to a single person picking a number out of his head?
A single person picking a number out of their head is voting, because all the person can do is make a suggestion. Every suggestion is voted on, by investors. Superimposing a second voting mechanism, and more complexity with it, seems redundant. That is, unless you think "hard forks are dangerous." I say, get comfortable with the fork, make it so that it is easy to do with predictable results, and then use it whenever necessary. Whatever its dangers may be, the dynamics of that voting mechanism are far superior. |
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I'm more of the opinion that Bitcoin will succeed, provided that it does not fail, and that a misstep can easily be worse than doing nothing.
Intelligent people may disagree with this.
The question is, what more qualifies as "doing nothing": - Letting Bitcoin operate with constantly full blocks, which has never been done before, or
- Continuing to let Bitcoin operate with non-full blocks, effectively uncapped,* as it always has
?* Of course a large part of the debate is over whether the current hard cap is actually doing anything. So the appeal to conservatism implied by "doing nothing" just pushes the question back. |
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Surprisingly bullish poll results so far.
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I'm less interested in rushing the hard fork than I was, now that it seems less likely that Bitcoin breaks due to full blocks.
High fees eventually is burdensome, but that's a much less urgent problem because it takes real adoption to get fees high and it ramps gently. Hopefully fees will give us a nice smooth ramp up in pain so that the need to hard fork can come smoothly to a head, rather than suddenly, leaving the holdouts with no ground to stand on so that consensus is easier, without having the pain be so sudden and intense that it results in a PR fiasco.
Gavin's plan to schedule a hard fork for a future date is fine with me, though, since it can always be unscheduled if necessary. In the meantime we can expect everything to be tried and tested so that we'll know whether it's really necessary and how much opposition there really is.
A fork will be necessary eventually either way, and everyone acknowledges that. Since the question is only "when and by how much," the ramping fees creates a nice gentle mounting of pressure toward consensus on exactly how the "raise the cap" vs. "optimize other ways" contours play out.
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I think Gavin should de-hitch his wagon from Mike Hearn after hearing how Mike proposed centralized checkpointing. The blacklisting thing was his one free pass at a really horrible idea. Now it just looks like he doesn't get what Bitcoin is really about.
I can see why Gavin would utilize XT as an end-run around the political gridlock in core, and I also see that Mike Hearn has a unique perspective and background that is useful, but he should not be a core committer in my opinion. Gavin is the only person qualified to (provisionally) lead the project as far as I can see now, but I think "palling around with Mike Hearn" will be viewed with suspicion, especially if it's unnecessary. Why not just just add in the patch to Core and fork off if necessary?
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Up until now I have always had complete faith in Bitcoin, even with all of the hacks and bad publicity, and the massive year and a half long price decline. Now I am not so sure. The block size problem seams as though it may be the last straw. I just don't see how Bitcoin can survive intact after this, no matter which way it goes. There are too many egos, and ulterior motives involved for a strong Bitcoin to emerge on the other side.
Doesn't matter. If anyone stands in the way of honey badger, honey badger just eats through their torso and out the other side. In other words, if it became clear to the larger community of investors, infrastructure owners, and luminaries that some of the devs were obstructing changes for political or other irrelevant reasons, someone in the community - maybe Gavin, maybe anyone - will create a fork with the required changes and after deliberation and testing the vast majority would adopt it. Personalities cannot stop Bitcoin. If they try, they just get left behind coding for a worthless fork. Investors are who is in control. Or look at it this way, in what other system in the world do people debate so carefully and thoroughly, so far in advance, about such relatively minor changes that hypothetically might cause a temporary issue? The answer is, only in the most important, civilization-wide mission-critical systems. This should tell you how big of a thing Bitcoin is. This level of debate shows the world we're very serious and are thinking through every nook and cranny of possibility to ensure that this baby grows up to take on the world. Don't confuse vigorous debate, posturing, and alarmism for gridlock. These things are inevitable because of how much money is on the line. Gavin already agreed to a smaller increase like Peter Todd wanted and to Jeff Garzik's proposal. Consensus is not far away, and a little nudge from full blocks and some pain of backlog will be all that is needed to push through a modest increase, after which the precedent will have been set against the radical "1MB forever" people, so that will be out of the way, and also we'll have better data to argue from. For example, if the new block space soon fills up with spam, we'll know we need to optimize via fees instead next time, and if node count doesn't go down much and large miners don't trample smaller miners then the centralization argument sputters out. |
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Something's brewing...  |
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hmmm, i hope he doesn't view Bitcoin as simply a digital proxy for physical gold. i hope that here he is just referring to a specific SC implementation of bitcoins for physical gold. imo, Bitcoin is digital gold at it's most basic level. i sure hope gmax thinks the same way. the whole point of Bitcoin is to REPLACE physical gold, not eventually redeem those tokens for gold!
At least Nick Szabo agrees: https://twitter.com/NickSzabo4/status/605890791991410690Au will eventually be replaced by cryptocurrency as reserve currency, but like beads still used as jewelry. |
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b/c i just debunked the main spam attack the Blockstream devs have been scaring everyone with: LOL, this quote just cut the legs out from Blockstream's main objection to raising the block limit; that being the large block attack on small miners supposedly facilitated by "superior" bandwidth connections. Well, the largest miners in the world are telling us they have "inferior" connections! Lol! What a bunch of amateurs. “A very large block size would be problematic for miners because the network bandwidth between China, where the majority of mining is done, and rest of the world is heavily restricted. Important proposals like these need to factor in all of the nuances of the global landscape.”They'll just switch to saying "well-connected miners will torment not-well-connected miners." |
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I think the woman trying to smuggle the bitcoins into Russia (in her ...) was the most interesting news I've seen for a while. How many other people are evading capital controls with brain wallets and not getting caught? How long until that becomes widespread?
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But that is my entire point — I didn't have to make those assumptions because the conditional probability of losing 1% to the unknown is so much greater than the conditional probability of losing 50% to the unknown, so that is clearly the inferior risk in an ambiguous specification (which might actually be the captain's information set). Ah, that's one way to look at it. I assumed from the way the puzzle was presented that any interpretation that involved probabilities was not be considered. Just because that seems to be the cultural norm for such questions. I think IQ tests are more about culture + a decently high bar for IQ, than a direct measure of anything. That is, over a certain number what they're really measuring is how clued in you are to the tacit assumptions of academic/mathematical/mind-puzzle culture. Kind of like I can usually predict how highly a LessWrong.com comment will be upvoted almost solely on how LessWrongian it sounds, regardless of actual content. By the way, it seems that I, too, never sleep:  Some of us just have very irregular sleep schedules. I've been up all night and it is now 8am in Japan, and I'm about to do 4 hours a work if I can just get break out of the Bitcoin news cycle. |
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If more than 1% of the top 51% decide to try their luck at getting more after the captain is eliminated, then the captain dies. Assumptions about the rationality of the participants can become extremely complex. Mutual agent-modeling itself, which that is potentially an example of (depending on the assumptions), can actually go "infinitely" complex even in very simple cases: In most messaging apps, when I send you a message, I can see whether you read it or not. It places a little "Read" next to the message I sent, like this:  That basically tells me whether you know what I wrote. But the app could, although it doesn't, also proceed to tell you that I read the "Read" on the message; that is, it could tell you that I know that you read it, so that you know that I have seen that you have already read my message. Then it could go even further and tell me that you saw the message that indicated that I had seen that you had read my original message. Then it could tell you that I had seen that, and then me that you had seen that, and so on without end. This shows how it is an actual "thing" to know that someone knows that you know that they know that you know that they know, etc. By that I mean, each of those endless possible steps are different. "I know that you know" is different from "I know that you know that I know," which is different still from "I know that you know that I know that you know." And so on. One might assume it's just some kind of toggling, like repeatedly multiplying a number by -1, but it isn't. Each successive state is unique and potentially represents a different set of possible real world implications. In everyday life we usually quickly stop caring or get too confused and forget before these can get nested all that deeply, but now... Imagine a highly communicative environment where you are making very meaningful-feeling eye contact with someone in the moment, where you feel like you have a rather clear picture of their mental state, and they of yours. This is like a situation where the nesting is going very deep in super-fast iterations, possibly a very richly communicative situation where you might even call it a momentary "incredible connection." That's another example, with nested iterations of modeling each other's modeling of each other's modeling of each other's mental state, etc... Akin to placing two mirrors opposite one another and seeing the nested pattern that forms and trails off into "infinity." It is a tangent to remark that "infinity" or boundless possibility is praxeologically baked into human relationships, when there is an effort to concentrate on that nesting and the modeling is fairly accurate (during a makeout or vibing or very same-wavelength joking around or whatever). In any case, modeling other people - at least during these kinds of interactions - is impossible in the sense that if they're trying to model you while you're trying to model them, you have to try to model their modeling of you while they're trying to model your modeling of them, and then their modeling of you modeling their modeling of them, etc. It's not just a trivial toggling, but an endless blossoming of intricacy. So I don't think there is an unambiguously correct answer to the pirate puzzle as stated, due to way too much underspecification of assumptions, and I think that's exactly the aim. But anyway, what of Paul Stzorc's response to Vitalik? Riskless counter-contracts. In general with PoS it seems to me that Vitalik and the other PoS people are falling into the "make the security model confusing enough that even really smart people can't understand it = good security" error. Sure, PoS doesn't seem confusing, but with things like stake-grinding plus an endless parade of more unfamiliar-to-security-researchers workarounds it optimizes for a security model that's difficult to poke holes in during debate, but that a motivated attacker could eventually figure out how to attack precisely because it's too opaque to know that what the attack vectors are so that they can be defended against. |
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Two can play: https://disqus.com/home/discussion/ethereumproject/the_p_epsilon_attack/#comment-2028779600You're the captain of a pirate ship, and your crew gets to vote on how the gold is divided up. If fewer than half of the pirates agree with you, you die. How do you recommend apportioning the gold in such a way that you get a good share of the booty, but still survive?
Answer: You divide the booty evenly between the top 51% of the crew. I read this puzzle as intending that only the captain can put a proposal to a vote (and he only gets one shot; presumably it's something like a perfect equal split among the crew if the captain gets voted down and killed*), in which case Google's original answer is right since each winning pirate does stand to lose if they vote no. *Even if we instead assume that any pirate is allowed to make a counterproposal after the captain is dead, a pirate could just propose voting down the captain and the loot being divided among a different 51% set that includes him (the pirates in the overlap group should side with counterproposal, since they get slightly more loot without the captain around anymore). Of course then another pirate will do that with 52%, knowing his proposition will win. Then 53%, etc. until they end up at an even split among 100% of the crew as the winning proposition by vote count. So assuming the crew is rational they will vote yes if they luck out and make it into the 51%. So either way it seems Google has it right. The "no-voters don't get the loot" proviso is unnecessary, unless maybe we are not assuming rational pirates. (And in fact, this shows you can keep nearly half the loot (assuming you have a decent-sized crew), giving 51% of the crew the other half plus a tiny bit more, which is a bit more than they get if they vote you down. So Google's answer is also too low.) Too many ways to read it, though, so it's basically indeterminate/underspecified as far as I'm concerned. I think it's called an "IQ test" to obscure the real purpose, that it's way for them to see your thought process during an interview. It's perhaps intentional that everyone will add in their own assumptions, or maybe even harp on the need to specify assumptions, or about the how killing the captain or having 49% be jealous would leave them in worse shape. Each of these kinds of reactions gives useful information to the hirers. |
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I feel the force of the argument, but I think it only applies to the ledger-updating protocol, not the ledger itself. From an investment perspective, the ledger is what matters. The ledger is where the most economically important network effects are.
Even if TPTB can centralize and control the protocol, they can't stop the users of the ledger (BTC holders) from switching to a different ledger-updating protocol. Thus the store of value is maintained, and the network effect of what is now called "the Bitcoin ledger" is maintained. Now they could cut it off in its infancy, push another ledger to compete with it, etc., and that would be damaging, but you'd still have that core group of people who are aligned with the principles Bitcoin was intended to uphold, ready to carry on with that ledger.
One of the general classes of mistakes I see repeated in economic analysis is the erroneous concept that time is reversible. Path dependencies proliferate not vice versa. For example, the wealth effect (i.e. market price determines market cap != wealth invested) destroys wealth on the egress. Are you saying path dependency applies to the ledger as well? Your logic of collective action arguments may apply to "the masses," but Bitcoin remains usable by those who understand such things, which is globally a decent-sized (and rapidly growing) economic bloc. There is no collectivism in a system where you can fork off or otherwise "exit in place" at will. The logic of voice vs. exit is the dominant dynamic in the Internet economy, which is unburdened by the usual territorial considerations. |
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Note: F2Pool (a.k.a. Discus Fish) rejects 20MB but supports 5-10MB. Certainly not an argument against an increase.
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do you care to explain how it's centralized again.
if the idea you have is correct then it needs to spread, it wont spread if it cant be understood.
can you ELI5.
Because the center (the group acting in lock step) has the power to include or not include transactions (and set transaction fees). That alone is already centralization. And worse is that power (lack of autonomy of the ends of the network) can be monopolized, e.g. State regulation of mining, Larry Summer's 21 Inc economics that mine for free for the cartel, Sybil attack on pools, economies-of-scale (and fiat subsidy via the usury backstop) with ASICs, electricity costs charged to the society, Transactions Withholding Attack, etc, etc, etc. Do I need to enumerate every monopolization vector in detail again (each was already debated upthread)? I feel the force of the argument, but I think it only applies to the ledger-updating protocol, not the ledger itself. From an investment perspective, the ledger is what matters. The ledger is where the most economically important network effects are. Even if TPTB can centralize and control the protocol, they can't stop the users of the ledger (BTC holders) from switching to a different ledger-updating protocol. Thus the store of value is maintained, and the network effect of what is now called "the Bitcoin ledger" is maintained. Now they could cut it off in its infancy, push another ledger to compete with it, etc., and that would be damaging, but you'd still have that core group of people who are aligned with the principles Bitcoin was intended to uphold, ready to carry on with that ledger. |
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How do you create a network topology that is decentralized at any scale?
With a design that enables the ends of the network to be autonomous (e.g. the internet), i.e. the End-to-End principle. Ideally the power (autonomy) of the ends over the center (or the group) should get stronger the more it is Sybil attacked (i.e. the attack doesn't exist). Abstractly not erroneously redefining decentralization to be centralization-by-free-will-but-no-other-choice (aka "one for all, and all for one" collectivism) as Bitcoin did: Marching in lockstep doesn't mean centralized (of course; that's the whole idea of Bitcoin in a way). So no universal agreement on the state of the ledger? There must be some way of settling up over time. But I guess you just mean the protocol doesn't have to be shared, in some sense. This may be outside my technical knowledge. Not being a coder at all, I admit I haven't thought a great deal about how Bitcoin runs under the hood until recently. Your hints are getting somewhat tantalizing, but without seeing the whole thing we of course can't know if there's some obvious error if you're recreating Hashcash or Ripple/Stellar (can you? if it's that important you may as well open it to peer review; with a lot of it precoded you could still easily be first out of the gate). |
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This begs the question. It presupposes success.
When a fork occurs, you are on one side or the other at the time of the fork.
"If everyone's doing it" means that they have already done it, so there is no longer anything to be attractive to them. It is an event, not a migration. Unless you are imagining many many failed forks until one finally succeeds, which would be exceedingly chaotic.
A hard fork shouldn't normally happen unless we have near-consensus enough for that effect to play. I thought the issue that there will be those last few percent who don't monitor the news, don't see the alert warning somehow (the big red button Gavin has doesn't at least interrupt the software forcing the user to pay attention before doing anything else?), and yet for some reason are needing to monitor a transaction involving themselves and somehow try to refer to their node software and not see anything amiss. Those few people would be inconvenienced in a pretty big way because they wouldn't be able to validate payment on their own node without updating, but in practice at this time how big a deal is it really to trust another service, or the consensus of several? If we're talking about a merchant who hasn't who hasn't accepted a transaction for a month, is it likely to be for a huge amount? I don't really think merchant adoption has advanced very far yet, and most use Bitpay/Coinbase anyway. It's liable to create some problems and is hardly ideal, but as far as emergency fork it seems not undoable. If someone could paint a picture of the potential issue they see that would help. |
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