Hmmm.  Ironic.  Let me fix this for you:

A node which relayed “all information that is passed through it” would be worse than useless.

A node receives what purports to be a baton, supposed to be of solid gold.  But the baton is received from an untrusted source.  It could be made of fool’s gold—or it could be a stick of dynamite with a lit fuse.  The node examines the baton, performs laboratory assays on it, and absolutely verifies its characteristics.  If and only if the baton passes all tests, then the node accepts the baton into its internal databases and passes on copies to others.

Not so.  Nodes validate the data they receive against consensus rules.  That is the most important part of a node’s job.

Nodes are responsible for securing the validity of the network, as well as the validity of their own databases.  That is why running your own full node is the most secure way to use Bitcoin—really, the only secure way.

To fill out this explanation, miners have one and only one function:  To determine the ordering of transactions in a Byzantine fault-tolerant distributed database with no central authority.  That is what miners do.  That is all miners do.  Granted, it is a very valuable function; that is why they get paid for it.  But all other functions in the security and validity of the network are done by nodes.  The nodes’ responsibility includes enforcing validity of blocks, in case miners create invalid blocks.  Nodes do not follow the chain with the most proof-of-work:  They follow the entirely validated and valid chain with the most proof-of-work.

Thanks so much for pissing in the pool here.  I hope you O.D.  Otherwise, die in a fire.

The same goes for all the other pathetic wretches who have used this unlucky perpetual thread to brag about their self-infliction of mental defects.

The short answer:  Ill-informed nincompoops who overestimate their own competence enjoy voicing opinions to which they are not entitled; and all which cannot be explained by stupidity, is caused by malice.  Cui bono?  “Follow the money.”

Longer answer, for those who wish to actually understand this issue:

The following told me all I needed to know about the anti-Segwit agitation and later, the so-called “Bitcoin Cash” scamcoin.  For more technical details, see also the references listed in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures database under CVE-2017-9230, or the high-level description by Test User earlier in this thread.  N.b. that without Segwit, covert ASICBOOST is still wide-open for exploitation in “Bitcoin Cash”.

With boldface added, from this bitcoin-dev mailing list post on 2017-04-05 21:37:45 UTC:


Observe that a purported patent on a 20+% economic advantage threatens to give certain parties a substantial centralized influence over who has the most hashrate.  It is not only cheating:  Overall, covert ASICBOOST opens the way for a direct attack against the Byzantine fault-tolerant security of the Bitcoin network.

So as for ulterior motives to oppose Segwit.  What overt arguments are advanced by the anti-Segwit side?

On the presumption that Segwit-haters must have at least some plausible excuse for their position, I have spent far too many hours searching the Net and reading what they say.  My objective:  Find even one good reason to oppose Segwit on technical grounds.  Yet despite my such efforts, I have never seen a valid technical argument against Segwit.  All the anti-Segwit pseudo-technical arguments are unsubstantive handwaving—yes, it’s a moderately big patch; of course, it’s a big feature!—or bald-faced lies—e.g., the claim that miners could collude to grab “anyone-can-spend” transactions; no, Segwit full nodes would reject such such blocks as invalid, making such miners waste all their effort.[1]  (This last is not even a Segwit-specific matter:  Any soft fork will result in similar scenarios, which is exactly what makes the fork “soft” even when introducing radically different validation rules.  The alternative is a hardfork.)

The rest of the anti-Segwit arguments are nontechnical.  Some make menacing insinuations about Blockstream:  Very well, assume arguendo that Blockstream is pure evil (facts not in evidence) and totally controls Core (which they evidently don’t).  What is so bad about Segwit?  The question remains unanswered.  The remainder of anti-Segwit spew is merely moronic:  Insults devoid of all substance, at the puerile grade of “Segwit makes you a doodie-head”.

Meanwhile, in so-called “Bitcoin Cash”, almost three and a half months of EDA fluctuations made something tantamount to a premine of fake-Bitcoin.  In that time as well as afterwards, any party exploiting covert ASICBOOST could and can reap BCH at 20+% under the energy cost paid by other miners.  Oh.  Suddenly, it all makes sense.  Cui bono, indeed.  Follow the money.

---

1. Miners have exactly one function:  Byzantine fault-tolerant ordering of transactions.  Important and valuable though that function may be, it is strictly limited in technical scope.  Miners do not have authority over validation:  All full nodes are responsible for enforcing validation, and will reject invalid mined blocks just as if rejecting random garbage.  Such is the power of each and every individual full node.  This is a point of common misunderstanding amongst ignorant fools who imagine that miners somehow own the network; and the misunderstanding is encouraged by persons with material ulterior motives for pretending that miners be Bitcoin gods.

When trying to access https://beta.bitcointalk.org/, I get the following error:


That is with current Tor Browser, and whatever roots it bundles (mostly (?) inherited from Firefox).  As observed through multiple different Tor circuits over a period of several hours, the same certificate presents with the following properties.  I would guess that its chain is not properly configured on the webserver.


N.b. also, epochtalk.org apparently does not have TLS at all.  Failure to connect; port 443 not listening?

I suspect that the issue is not keeping out bots as such, but preventing bruteforce attempts against luser passwords.  theymos et al., am I right?  Bots need an account for spam.  The forum already charges “evil” IP addresses Bitcoin for new signups.  But most people pick bad passwords; they think that “p4ssw0rd1975” is super-unguessable.  Do the maths.


The CAPTCHA varies its “difficulty” (actually: its tediousness) based on Google’s opinion of the connecting IP address.  Do not assume your experience to be the same as others’.  It isn’t.

For Tor users, this often means page after page of “challenges” which in total take up to a few minutes to solve.  I have not recently done a Google CAPTCHA in less than sixty seconds, and I’ve had plenty of practice.  When I click “Verify”, I get hit with another round; n.b. it does not say my answers are “incorrect”, it just gives me another “challenge”.  Also, as I posted above, Google may even refuse to serve a CAPTCHA.  Google now has the peremptory power to lock people out of bitcointalk.org.

This forum is Tor-friendly, which I much appreciate.  According to theymos, Satoshi “always used Tor” to connect to this forum.  But Satoshi would now find his time wasted, likely to the eventual point of giving up in frustration.

The following happened again just now, multiple times.  I had to repeatedly change circuits before I could even get a CAPTCHA.  Observe that this gives Google the power to fully lock Tor users out of Bitcointalk.org any time they want:


The CAPTCHA then took me 89 seconds to solve—first slowly-reappearing storefronts, then a long batch of street signs.  This was when I knew I was timing it, so I tried to do it as fast as I could; and as one who has exclusively used Tor to access the Internet for some years, I think I must have world-class CAPTCHA solving skills.

Signature quoted to illustrate a point:  What’s with the martyrdom complex?

ASICBOOSTCOIN has the odour of a cult/sect.  Not even one of the fun ones:  I mean the boring kind of garden-variety cult whose messiah shears disciples of all their money, whereafter everybody commits mass suicide.  As such, it seems eerily appropriate that this scamcoin is fronted by a self-touted “Bitcoin Jesus”, Roger Ver.

Of course, the foregoing presumes sincerity of “Mrpumperitis”.  The other option is that a low-rent shill just doesn’t know the difference between earnestness and fevered hype.  Be that so, whoever pays must have low standards.  Really, how many BCH does it take to buy an apostrophe?  Yes, “ill”, indeed.

N.b. that on 2017-11-14, the date of the quoted post, “Mrpumperitis” left negative trust ratings against three different users, two of whom have posted in this thread.  All three ratings seem to have been simple revenge from a flamewar in another “Bitcoin Cash” thread.  I wouldn’t trust Roger Ver to distribute car wash tokens; and I wouldn’t trust his followers’ opinions about trustworthiness.

So-called “Bitcoin Cash” is neither Bitcoin, nor cash, in the sense that it has neither the unlinkability nor the fungibility of cash.  It and its ilk are also generically different from honest altcoins, which at least have the decency to make their own names.  I don’t even know what to properly call it—other than a scam, of course; and anybody who does not realize it’s a scam must be one or more of ill-informed, malicious, or incurably stupid.

That said, the automatic replacement of words in software is always a bad idea.  The problems it creates make a “clbuttic” software failure category; moreover, that would mangle posts such as this one.  See, I mentioned “so-called ‘Bitcoin Cash’”.  In context, changing my words would destroy the meaning of what I said above; and I would be most displeased, on the principle that nobody has a right to change my words.  You may delete them, yes, if I were to say something against forum rules; but never presume to put words in my mouth!

Yet the “free speech” arguments in this thread also fall flat.  The self-styled “Bitcoin Cash” would be clear-cut trademark infringement, if Bitcoin had any owner or backing entity to enforce a trademark—which it fortunately does not.  Try opening a burger joint, calling it “McDonald’s”, using a logo of slightly rotated double-arches, claiming outright to be “the real McDonald’s”—and then claiming that’s your “free speech”.  See how far you get.

Now, I am not a fan of trademark law as it has been twisted to be.  But this is not a matter of inadvertent vague similarity which looks like it may be slightly confusing, if you squint at it and try hard to be confused.  Rather, so-called “Bitcoin Cash” is a textbook example of the precise theory on which the concept of trademark rests:  It’s wrong for scammy scammers to scam people by intentionally creating name confusion so as to leech off trust and goodwill.  This obvious conceptual wrong is part of the reason why normal people tend to nod their heads when trademark lawyers talk, instead of strangling them with their own entrails.  (The other part is that normal people are inept at catching the rhetorical tricks by which trademark lawyers expand that wrong to cover things quite dissimilar.)

Fortunately, Bitcointalk.org already has a rule which ought obviate this whole discussion:  “14. All altcoin related discussion belong in the Alternate cryptocurrencies and it's [sic] child boards.”  Despite my aforesaid discomfort with describing scamcoin “Bitcoin Cash” as an “alt”, moderator enforcement of this longstanding rule is perhaps the best all-around solution.

Moderators, when you see a post promoting “Bitcoin Cash”, please think:  Would I delete the post and/or sanction the user, if this were promoting ABCXYZCoin?  In many forums, for most posts, the answer would be yes.  I suspect that this would solve much of the problem, especially in forums where newbies are most likely to be misled.

I hope that helps.  As for myself, I am still having trouble deciding what I should call Roger Ver’s little abortion.  Perhaps ASICBOOSTCOIN.  Any better ideas?  “We’re-not-engineers-don’t-know-much-about-scaling-and-don’t-care-Coin” is too long.

I use Tor.  On my current login, I got this:


Changing circuits worked—this time; but if Google is sometimes refusing to even serve up a CAPTCHA, that bodes ill for the future.  These things tend to go one way.

I posted separately on the general issue of the login CAPTCHA.  Sorry that post was misplaced.

It is also problematic that Google’s image-clicking CAPTCHAs force me to work for free, enslaving me to their so-called “AI” on projects I despise.  Right.  “Self-driving cars.”  No, cars which are not under your control.  A Google-driven car is like money in a bank, as opposed to Bitcoin, the car with a steering wheel and pedals.

I am curious as to how difficult it will be to get this verified with a signature from my Segwit P2WPKH-in-P2SH address.  A few of the online tools linked in this thread seem to choke on it.


Cross-certification with PGP key:


Please verify and quote!

Thank you, theymos, for honestly disclosing and discussing the facts about Cloudflare.  It is for exactly the reasons you stated that I filed Tor Browser bug #24351: Block Global Active Adversary Cloudflare.

I usually dislike Cloudflared sites.  Well, here is one run by someone who actually understands.  What a conundrum!  I suppose I simply won’t send any data to this forum which I would not publish openly.

Good luck stopping the DDoS attacks; and I hope you can find a better solution someday soon.