How about reading some of these: http://bitcoinstats.com/irc/bitcoin-dev/logs/2015/01 and open your eyes to the vista of projects, github issues, refactoring, testing, test plans, problem solving, packaging, maintenance, etc, ad nauseum, being tackled all the time.

Other altcoin devs?

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2rrxq7/on_why_010s_release_notes_say_we_have_reason_to/cnip5es

Hmm. It was nice imagining that higher btc volumes would come from replacing fiat payments in real-world b2c and b2b flows. Perhaps not from a monkey swinging between palm trees:

5,000 transactions in 1 day
https://blockchain.info/address/17ZgzoQUAiCrCgSieYfGhAvToW9kn6uaLt



Apple Inches towards Bitcoin, Approves a retro-styled iOS game that tips players in Real Bitcoin
By Forexminute - Deepak Tiwari | Bitcoin | Jan 9, 2015 3:36AM GMT

There is a lot of scope for Bitcoin in gaming industry; however, this has not yet been explored. The step from Apple to approve a retro-styled iOS game that tips players in real Bitcoin, recently releasing it onto the iTunes store, is going to encourage others in the fray. A lot of game lovers have appreciated the measure from Apple.
According to the sources the game, SaruTobi, lets users swing a monkey from a vine, building up momentum before releasing him to collect power-ups and Bitcoin tokens as he frolics though the air. Developer Christian Moss told the media professionals that SaruTobi is literally Japanese for ‘Monkey Fly’, and this is pretty much the premise of the game.
He says that the user flings him across an 8-bit jungle collecting floating Bitcoin along the way. According to him he was in the process of adding typical Super Mario-style coins into the game when it occurred to him to use Bitcoin instead. He admits that he thought it would be a nice way to introduce Bitcoin to people who are not familiar with it yet.
The approval from Apple is also an indication that somewhere people at the organization think that the digital world can truly be Bitcoin’s natural environment. The iOS game has three main aims – attaining the greatest distance, collecting Bitcoin tokens to be spent on in-app items, and collecting the letters ‘SARUTOBI’ to unlock a Bitcoin ‘boost’ to spend on in-game items.
A Long Way to Go Says Christian Moss, the Developer
Developer Christian Moss says that the Bitcoin tips come from the game’s shared Bitcoin wallet, called a ‘pot’, revenue generated by the game (from in-app purchases and ads) is converted into Bitcoin and added to the pot. He informs that after the user has played the game for a certain amount of time, the game will reward the user by sending them a Bitcoin tip.
Moss is of the view that though he has come across a few concept games that use Bitcoin micro-transactions, nothing on the iOS app store he believes having a popular iOS app that incorporates Bitcoin can go a long way to helping it become mainstream. He further says that he is currently working on a new Bitcoin mining game.
He concludes and says that it is still in the early stages of development; however, the player will be able to dig, similar to Minecraft, and collect real Bitcoin."

Yes. But it is a credit line available for Stamp to use while they restock from operating profits.

Poloniex and BitNZ were both hacked, lost coins, and still came back fine. It depends upon the amount of coins stolen, and 19k is probably manageable for Bitstamp. They have VC capital to cover it, and the main shareholders are multi-millionaires.

Scrape a little at that gilt and see the dull grey of lead and tungsten.

Great video.
Once Stamp is sorted out I can see a long-term general increase in bullish sentiment.

Indeed. I do remember our discussions about the 8 decimals, and your input on the financial system software was crucial.
I guess right now I am dismayed at how many Bitcoin companies (and individuals) are getting coins stolen. Even knowledgeable people who are being very careful about what they do.

I agree that "trustworthy computing" is a good term, and hopefully there are others.

I don't think language matters that much, and once it is out there it becomes hard to change.

Bitcoin's biggest problem is wallet security. As has been pointed out elsewhere, if experts like Bitstamp can't secure their hot wallet then what hope is there for the ordinary man in the street?

Currently, I am reading this paper which is a step in the right direction to solve Bitcoin's biggest problem:

"Securing Bitcoin wallets via threshold signatures"
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~stevenag/bitcoin_threshold_signatures.pdf

The next US Marshall's auction might see a keen bidder from Central Europe.

And I'm pleased that you see the potential in IBLT.
I know that your concern is that Bitcoin remains viable in a global SHTF, Katie-bar-the-door event. This is important, and I think that Bitcoin having IBLT capability beforehand will only strengthen it in the face of such times.


Just a general clarification about how transactions are condensed in an IBLT. They are present in their entirety, but XOR'd together. Some might be familiar with XOR:



Basically, in an IBLT, as per the example above, the encrypt data, Plaintext and Secret Key, are instead Unconfirmed-tx1, and Unconfirmed-tx2. This gets broadcast and nodes decrypt it by subtracting out transactions they already know, in a pre-agreed order. If a node knows both tx1 and tx2 the resulting plaintext is binary zeros. If a node knows only one of the two tx then the plaintext is the whole other tx they didn't know before. If both tx1 and tx2 are unknown by the receiver then decrypt fails and the IBLT is rejected. The risk of the latter case is the new enforcement incentive on miners to be good citizens and include consensus unconfirmed tx in their blocks.

Great ebook by Andreas!
Yep, the UTXO set is the essence of the blockchain, however, IBLT is solely concerned with zero-conf tx which want to get into the blockchain  .


Yes, and a proof of principle is already proposed: implementing it on top of the block relay service, which transmits lists of new-block tx hashes to subscribing nodes.


The unconf tx sets differences are quite low. Unknown tx's are those which have not been broadcast to the network, and are known only to the miner who might have got them direct from a spammer source (for a fee). I was only giving an example of how, under the existing paradigm, a new block can consist of secret or private tx, not previously broadcast. So, although there is good consensus on unconf tx, the consensus can be ignored. Volumes are currently not high enough to make IBLT a noticeabe improvement to what we have now.


I was just using the current limitation, and also noting that 1MB blocks are occasionally happening already. The success of any node decoding an IBLT is probabilistic. The smaller an IBLT is, the higher the probability of decode failure. So it makes sense to start at a largish, workable size which can support a decent number of differences, such as 1500. The final block size, written to disk, could be smaller than 1MB, and might normally be for a while, but the disk blocks still grow with the ecosystem volume. It might take many years to hit 150,000 tx per block, which would* max out the 1MB IBLT.

*likely, but not necessarily

OK, so the bounds.

Note that UTXO is unspent tx outputs held in the blockchain, but unconfirmed tx are in node mempools, pending inclusion into the blockchain by miners. What Satoshi achieved with his PoW blockchain breakthrough was consensus on the whole transaction history, and resulting UTXOs. I think of that as the steel-work in a skyscraper. What IBLT does is go to further by enforcing consensus on unconfirmed transactions, it pours concrete into that steel reinforcing. This is a significant improvement to cryptocurrency, but it is truly effective only at high volumes, volumes too high for the existing standard method of block propagation.

The reason is that right now the whole network could agree on the same 2000 unconfirmed tx, real-world business, but the next block mined can contain none of them. It could be full of previously unknown gambling dice-bot spam tx, a set which is 100% different. Because these tx validly spend UTXO, then the block is accepted, and the 2000 unconfirmed tx have to wait for the next block. However, when blocks are too big to propagate in the existing method, and require IBLT, then miners have to rely on the majority of the nodes knowing their unconfirmed tx in advance, they can only include a few unknown tx as the more unknowns they include the more likely their IBLT will fail to get decoded, and it gets rejected.

I expect IBLT blocks to be a constant size, starting at about 500KB or 1MB and staying at the same size for a long time, then increasing in steps, perhaps doubling after a number of years, just as the block reward halves periodically. A 1MB IBLT contains about 1500 differences, which means a 1% difference in mempools allows for 150,000 tx or 60MB disk blocks. A 32MB IBLT could support 3GB disk blocks, or 20,000 TPS, as by then differences of <1% should be the norm.

Bitstamp trading engine paused? No action for 15 mins...

Yes. The size of an IBLT does depend upon the average expected number of differences between the unconfirmed tx mempools of the majority of the nodes. Because each node has independent choice on which tx to accept or reject then it is impossible to be precise, in advance, about how efficient IBLT will be. Miners will always want to propagate small blocks, so there will be an incentive for mining nodes to find consensus on their tx mempools. Gavin describes it:


It is also worth noting that IBLT can be implemented on top of other block propagation models, such as Matt Corallo's block relay system, which already saves on bandwidth.


Thanks for making the clarification.


To be honest, I have not previously considered the points you make above. I have always taken Satoshi's block rewards->fees evolution at face value, and am not convinced that the majority of miners will work for zero income. Obviously this does happen to some of them, occasionally.

A real-world analogy must be the oil market. With the oil price down 45% a lot of producers are unprofitable, pumping for zero, and considering closing down. But there are profitable producers and the oil industry will continue, even if the price stays low and half of the producers go out of business.

Yes, but "simply" is an understatement. Real-time tx cross the network uniformly, with enormous capacity already available, perhaps 1000 TPS. It is block propagation which is time critical where milliseconds count. When a block is solved the rest of the mining network is then hashing uselessly until the block is fully propagated. Incentives are perverse, against large blocks which are ultimately needed to fund the network via fees rather than rewards. Removing the bottleneck for block propagation is a huge win for scaling Bitcoin.

Exactly.
And, the demand to support 100k TPS will not happen anytime soon, maybe two or three decades from now. I remember, about 1990, buying 30MB hard disk drives and thinking they held a lot of data. 2TB is common today, and by the 2030s high density optical data storage could be standard:

http://www.nature.com/lsa/journal/v3/n5/full/lsa201458a.html


With that, IBLT can slash bandwidth requirements by at least 2 orders of magnitude. Only full node bootstrapping and re-sync will remain bandwidth intensive.

Well, it's quite bearable after selling out of AUR about 8 months ago  

But, more than that, it is basically sad   Sad that a noble idea set forth on a bright day in full sail, then hit a reef, caught fire, disintegrated, sunk, covered in silt, rotted, eaten by worms, until nothing remains except faded dreams.

No.

Over-unity = Perpetual_motion

Don't worry, you will still be able to buy half of it back when it hits $556.

People who argue that the block size limit should never be increased are arguing from a position of ideology, not practicality. They want as many nodes as possible, helped by low volume overhead, thinking that limiting transaction throughput can maintain Bitcoin as a guerrilla enterprise outside mainstream finance. They want it to be the financial system for the "Unsystem".

Anyone who has read my posts for the last 2 years will know that I rail against the global corruption of central banks, their fiat FRB system, inflation targeting, interest rate manipulation, crony capitalism, asset bubbles, and stealth wealth transfers from the majority to the 0.1%. I see Bitcoin is a reset button for this 100-year mess, a river to flush out the Augean Stables of central banking. However, that river can never be diverted when it is a trickle, dammed upstream.

Answer the question "Is blockchain PoW (or its variants, perhaps even PoS) a better basis for a monetary system than the existing debt-money of CB fiat?"
If "yes", then the inexorable nature of science and technology will ensure that blockchain money prevails in the long run, 10, 20, 30 years from now. So the second question is "Will the future globally successful blockchain money be Bitcoin or some other alt coin?"

The answer to the second question is "Bitcoin, unless its first mover advantage is thrown away by an unresolved fundamental failing." Failure to scale is a fundamental failing which can consign Bitcoin forever to the margins of world finance. But, why would a marginalized Bitcoin be used even by its unsystem adherents when Darkcoin or Monero offer better anonymity?

Constraining the block size, therefore transaction volumes, ignores several important aspects of the situation:

1. The quality of nodes is much better than 5 years ago. There might have been 20,000 PCs and notebooks as nodes in 2010, cpu mining and supporting the network, but was that network better than the 6500 (known) nodes of today? Many of which are owned by companies now earning a living in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Corporate nodes are much more tolerant of volumes than hobbyist nodes.

2. Bandwidth is improving in many countries at up to 40% per year, so volume increases should be acceptable up to that level, or until another constraint is seen such as cpu signature verification. Limiting it at a 2010 baseline means it is being unnecessarily constrained as computing technology is still improving.

3. Block compression techniques exist to reduce propagation overhead. IBLT was only described in 2011, a year after Satoshi put the 1MB limit in place.

4. If Bitcoin fails to scale then I-Can-Scale-Coin will incorporate the necessary changes and the ecosystem will move across to that alt instead. Sidechains do not help with scaling because SC volume still needs to be handled somewhere.

5. Despite the long bearmarket of 2014, and price down at $290 right now, a large percentage of the price assumes that Bitcoin has future scalability. That it can grow to handle a reasonable percentage of world commerce. Its SoV is predicated upon being able to scale.

Accepting the block size limit as it stands is to do the central banks a massive favor by crippling this new emerging monetary system, giving them more years to screw up the world economy, before a new alt coin can eventually prevail.