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Good conversation and glad things are being civil. You so often lose that sort of context when looking at written forms such as forums.
I felt that they were both arguing for the right reasons, but had different views of what centralisation meant. I resonated very strongly with Dr Adam Backs concerns about corporate mining and datacenters being in the future (as a bad thing) which is a top-down systems view. Gavin seemed to relate that to the block size which was a kind of tenuous bottom-up view but understandable from being in the battle scarred trenches.
However, one was a systemic view of centralisation with the hindsight of the current network systems and the trends in high frequency trading, while the other was a technical possibility of a way that a specific form of centralisation might be obtained IF the block size pushes people off the network. While the latter is obviously the point behind the podcast if not that particular point in the discussion, it did open my eyes to where the possible divisions lie.
I couldn't shake the sense that they were arguing from different ends of the same problem and couldn't agree on where the middle was.
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My pet unprovable theory is that Satoshi (I think it is a single person) works for a government organisation for his day job and Bitcoin was his home hobby project. That organisation would come down hard on him if they ever found out he had released Bitcoin so he can never reveal himself. This thought gives me closure and peace that I will never know who he (I think it is a boy!) is.
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It’s easier to come up with problems and reasons why decentralisation won’t happen than it is to come up with solutions and I wish I could offer more constructive ideas. It does seem that everything tends towards centralisation and you have to actively guard against it.
I've got to agree here. It is a hard problem that we all thought Bitcoin had conquered. Turns out; not so much. I think the issue is profit. It's very hard to monetise a distributed system. It is why we have the internet we have to day and why Apple, Google and now Windows are walled gardens behind controlled access-ways. The target end-game of all for-profit ventures is a monopoly as that guarantees income, guarantees market share and guarantees a price. Targeting and crippling pools I don't think is a real solution. It just removes the only real competition to commercial miners - so I question the motives. Pools were the natural progression once hobbyists were overtaken by the costs of hardware needed to claim a steady income. I see pools as more of a community enterprise to pool resources in times of hardship. Unfortunately, that always provides the way through for the rentier business to offer coordination services very much the way Amazon, Ebay or Uber do. Eventually, they will be forced out or bought out by the commercial miners who will disincentivise hard-core hobbyist to give up on mining or exploit them with unfair terms. It's the town market verses the supermarket scenario and we know who wins that. So I suggest we don't target pools. We target mining, period. If un-outsourcable POW can decentralise away from commercial farms as well as pools, then I'm in. If it only targets my next door neigbour who bought a single Ant Miner with his Xmas cheque, then I am firmly against. Most non-outsourcable POW systems I've seen so far, however, only target the latter since a commercial miner is the admin and participants and therefor always gets the reward however you want to cut it. |
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Anyway.. It would be in their best interest to increment and hash a nonce on their own because that is much less costly than receiving nonce values and hashes from their peers. In other words, distributed computing is much slower than local computing.
Irrelevant. They have to hash to validate anyway but currently they get diddly squat for doing it. Your last phrase I find ironic for a supposedly distributed system. |
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Nodes would just increment the nonce on a single transaction until they succeeded.
That is fine. They are just like normal miners burning CPU and electricity but with very little chance of finding anything. The idea is that it is an opportunistic attempt that they have a very small chance of finding a block as each transaction is broadcast and passes through them. Sheer numbers of clients increase the probability that one of them might find one rather than a single client brute forcing. Dedicated miners may still find most blocks, but clients have a chance and their numbers scale up the competition rather than individual hashing power. If miners were to pull the plug and disappear completely , then the difficulty would drop and the clients would be running the network and getting the bounty  In other words. Miners would still be king of the hill, but we could live without them quite happily  You say that there are "no blocks" and then you say they get to "lay down the next block", so either this method would be equivalent to one transaction blocks, or blocks with no transaction limit. I'm not sure which.
Yes. Poor terminology on my part. I mean they don't hash 1MB (or greater) blocks of transactions. Just a transaction that has been broadcast by another client. So it is a block of 1 transaction, if you like, that should be inconsequential in term of overhead for a lightweight client. So the former. You can't rely on nodes having the same transactions in a cache, that's what PoW is trying to find consensus on to begin with, so without that how do you enforce "they only try 1 nonce"?
You don't need to enforce it. It is for the clients benefit so they do not replicate work they have tried before. Thinking a bit more about this aspect, they may want to try again if they see the same transaction, but with a new random nonce. The purpose behind the increment is just to give an indication as to whether it is worth trying to find a hash or not while covering the key space. Maybe it should be an incrementing coinbase hash too so that effectively each client is one (or more) "try" that a miner would do. |
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What do you think about "Proof of Network Work"
Every client mines transactions except they only try 1 nonce. So when they receive a broadcast transaction, they increment the nonce and calculate a random coinbase nonce then calculate the hash. If the hash doesn't result in a valid block, they re-transmit the transaction with the new nonce and move on to another transaction. Each client keeps a cache of the last N transactions and if the transaction has been seen before, then an attempt to "solve" is only tried if the incoming transaction nonce is higher than they saw before.
Therefore every client is a miner but only solving one transaction at a time (no blocks) and doing so as part of their re-transmission broadcast and verification. Whoever solves the transaction puzzle gets to lay down the next block (and gets the reward), just like the miners currently do.
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There is indeed spam -- for instance, what is the use of pushing outputs that require significantly more fees than the output is worth in order to re-spend them? It's pure spam.
Fees as a "spam" disincentive isn't working very well then, is it? If you need to send someone Sataoshis, the recipient doesn't care about the fees-they still demand the Satoshis. At some point the miners will push for not including transactions with zero or low fees at all, then Bitcoin will be another mainstream banking product. |
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There is no "spam" there are no "junk" transactions. There are only "unprofitable" transactions. The more I look at all these "issues", the more it seems that miners are the problem and we need to find another alternative to secure the block chain instead of relying on naked greed.
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Control the exchanges, you control peoples ability to enter and exit bitcoin. How are the Puerto Ricans going to get hold of their bitcoins while still avoiding the transaction tax?
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Democracy is not the government of choice. It is better, perhaps, than dictatorship. But it actually IS a form of dictatorship. Democracy is dictatorship by the majority. And because the dictates of the majority must be directed, there is still control of the whole by the few. The answer is, let everyone be free to do and be everything that he wants. The only time he should be controlled by the people, is when he harms someone or damages his property. Otherwise, complete freedom. After all. We are all certainly more capable of ruling our own life than anyone else is.  I think you are confusing democracy with a technical method of communicating ones desire for a choice given to them. |
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well everyone that is investment in BTC would get a say, and obviously we want to weight these votes with how much they are invested...
I see nothing wrong with that.
up until now ALL dev decision was done by 1 man with a vasion (pretty much)
allowing everyone with a BTC to join in the voting is a radical shift in the right direction...
not sure what you're upset about...
Here we go again! It's not everyone with BTC. It is a small number of infrastructure rich entities whos main interest is to consolidate that position and keep it that way. The one person that you speak of only controlled the code, not the network - that's a straw man argument and what I am upset about is this insistence that asking a few people that have wads of cash what we should do with bitcoin is consensus. It is not! |
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OP_IF <one month in the future> OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY OP_DROP <Alice's public key> OP_CHECKSIG OP_ELSE OP_HASH160 <Hash160(x)> OP_EQUALVERIFY <Bob's public key> OP_CHECKSIG OP_ENDIF After one month, Alice can spend the output Is there any use-case when this "return to sender if/when expired" would not be desirable as a default transaction? |
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We have a governance problem right now with the block size issue. It's not easy getting a consensus, it might even be impossible, so I wonder if it could be possible to organize a vote. Here's how we could do it.
To participate, you'd need to own BTC, and have several wallets, but I guess all of us do.
I would move, say, 5 BTC, from one of my wallets to another of my wallets, on a given day. The trick would be to embed in that transaction some code (which would have to be agreed upon beforehand), which would mean "I support XT" or "I support BIP 100". The transaction would be in the blockchain, and at the end of the day, some bot would calculate how many BTC have been moved with "I support XT" or "I support BIP 100".
I understand this system would give more voting rights to those who own the most BTC, but that doesn't worry me because I believe the more BTC you own, the best choice you will make to protect your investment. But we would need a system to prevent voters voting several times. I suggest that to have their votes validated, there should be no other transactions from the receiving wallet on voting day.
Now, since I'm not much of a techie, is that possible? And is it a good idea?
How about anyone that wants to vote, vanity gen some addresses say 1BIPa101...... 1BIPa102...... Everyone that wants to vote puts 1 BTC in their first choice, 2 BTC in their second 3BTC in their 3rd [or reverse order-whatever] address and leaves it there for as long as the voting is open. We don't say when the votes will be counted but give a rough indication of sometime in October, say. Then we count up the number of addresses of each in the block chain that have a single transaction of 1,2,3 BTC incoming (ignore those that move it out again). Once the voting is over, you can move your coin. |
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this idea is that getting the whole community involved in the process ( voting ) will speed up the process.
Gavin would probably of not wasted his time on XT had he only seen 1% of miners and investors willing to back it.
stalling would be equally hard if 90% of the network is voting for one change or another.
i mean at one point when we see some huge % of the poeple voting for a BIP, anyone can go ahead and safely fork bitcoin, with or without the dev team.
i think there needs to be better way for miners and investors to vote, right now miners are voting for there favorite BIP
they should actually be allowed to express their willingness to accept each BIP and vote for their favorite one
the coinbase data on each block would look something like this: "BIP100-YES, BIP101-YES, BIP106-NO, VOTE:BIP100"
that way we get more info, more pie charts, more fun.
Nice words. It's not the whole community though, is it! It is consensus between vested interests and monied organisations. Every week Bitcoin looks more and more like a status-quo banking system no matter how much the word consensus tries to make me believe what I think counts. So its agreement between those that own the means of production and those that lend them the money to buy means of production. Large bitcoin entities? They don't get much larger than the miners. What about all the bitcoin entities? |
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I do feel for the OP. But this points out a MAJOR flaw in bitcoin..... the fact that it's leading supporters / proponents / educators are currently a merry band of inbred idiots. Here's why I say this....
All over this site, I see people screaming in fear about the dangers of not using exchanges to hold your Bitcoin. If you don't hold your private keys, you don't really have your bitcoin. So here you have this schmuck that goes out and dumps a bunch of bitcoin into a situation that he really has no discipline / technological maturity, or understanding, of what he is doing - and he loses his money/bitcoin. The reason this happened is because he probably listened to the advice of a bunch of idealistic morons on here - and ultimately he got over his technological head.
Which is SO DARN IRONICALLY AMUSING - because everyone here crows about how Bitcoin is a global currency, and yet they don't have the brains or wisdom to understand that the global population is NOT technologically savy to the degree that they can be trusted not to screw up their bitcoin.
This thread really is the best advertisement in the world for why people should put their money into a "Professional Fiat Bitcoin" style Exchange (Circle, Coinbase, etc). Because your money is not only protected better from thieves (they have much better security than the average citizen), but more importantly, loss of an individuals money is best protected from THEMSELVES - their own stupidity.
And yeah, the big money running the exchanges.... they are greedy, evil, part of the system, basically the same people that are migrating over from running the fiat banks etc etc yatta yatta yatta.
But lets be perfectly clear.... ANY TIME that a person on this board makes reccomendations to people (who they have no idea what their technological maturity level is) that they need to be in charge of their digital money..... is basically just as evil as the banksters..... because ultimately you cause innocent people to lose their hard earned money.
Ohh, and PS.... I hate bankers more than any of you, and at least I have put a few in prison, more than I guess any of you posting here can say..... But reality and wisdom trumps paranoid teenage-minded anarchistic views any day. Bitcoin needs to grow up if it is to enter the mainstream, become a global currency etc.
A bit strong. You make some points in between the vitriol and they are valid but its hard not to look past the vehemence. I stand with those that submit that users can be their own bank and that it is a very desirable aspect to be in control of your own destiny. I also agree with you, that it is irresponsible to say that everyone needs to be in charge of their own money when they are not technically competent enough to use the tools to achieve it. What I don't agree with is that people are stupid just because they can't use technical tools any more than my wife is stupid for not knowing how to ride a motorbike like me. The issue is we, as a community, are supplying the tools that enable us to use the system easily and not for others to use the system safely. From that point of view Bitcoin it is not ready for general consumption IMO, because the very bright, tech savvy people are engaged in defining what bitcoin is rather than thinking about how bitcoin is used. Until you get experienced developers who write applications - rather than programs - engaged en-mass, this is the way it will stay. There are signs, though. Signs that usability is being thought about. They are disparate and disjointed, but they are there and the website seems to be one of them along with USB drive keys, wallet clients and so on. |
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if we can convincingly mitigate spam issues, does that mean we can remove blocksize limit from consensus rules?
Yes and we can theoretically have free transactions again (although miners will resist now they have been spoilt). |
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How about wallet clients act as aggregators, collating dust payments into larger transactions so miners never see spam?
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Only miners get to vote, because only miners approve transactions. The top 3 miners have a majority. What they say, goes. Deal with it.
That one sentence sums up why we do need to deal with the miners now rather than later. They won't like it though. |
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The best thing to do would probably be to change the mining algorithm, which would be a shame, really.
Maybe not. It could be a bitcoin meta coin. So you change the algo to produce blocks every few seconds instead of 10 mins and make it proof of burn, i.e. all spends are to null. Each "miner" is generating his own coin per transaction and can use that to send other transactions. These transactions are proxies for transactions on the bitcoin chain. |
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I still don't know why no one has come up with a credit card to store keys that you can then put in a safe. They are a lot more robust than paper. To put keys on it or take them off, you just swipe in a credit car reader/writer and lock them in the safe-job done! Make 10 of them and put them in the safe if you are worried about degradation (although they easily last 5 years under duress and constant swiping in someones real wallet).
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