Bitcoin XT - Officially #REKT (also goes for BIP101 fraud)

[btcusury]

People keep talking about the storage space, as if that were the main issue with larger blocks. I haven't been on top of the discussions lately, but I thought the main issue is the attack vectors that would be opened, such as withholding attacks becoming viable due to increased latency of block propagation.

@gmaxwell, Could you perhaps remind us, in summary, what the main problem(s) is (are) with increasing the max block size?

That does not mean I think the crowd will choose big blocks, it means that I think if bigger blocks are needed then I think that something will happen to ensure that bigger blocks happen.

This was one of the big fallacies involved in the "crash landing" spin by Gavin and Hearn; this notion that Bitcoin would willfully commit suicide.  Cranking the scale ahead of addressing scaliablity is/was controversial (not just among the most technical, though it's nearly universal there); but if it were strongly _necessary_, and better than the harm of not; then it would no longer be. That we're not there now, shows it isn't. QED.  And there is a tone of activity gone on to improve scalablity at all levels of the system, from micro optimizations, to protocol design.

In your view, do you think it's possible/probable that Gavin and Hearn have been compromised in some way, working for a different agenda than that which they started out with?

[QuestionAuthority]

People keep talking about the storage space, as if that were the main issue with larger blocks. I haven't been on top of the discussions lately, but I thought the main issue is the attack vectors that would be opened, such as withholding attacks becoming viable due to increased latency of block propagation.

@gmaxwell, Could you perhaps remind us, in summary, what the main problem(s) is (are) with increasing the max block size?

That does not mean I think the crowd will choose big blocks, it means that I think if bigger blocks are needed then I think that something will happen to ensure that bigger blocks happen.

This was one of the big fallacies involved in the "crash landing" spin by Gavin and Hearn; this notion that Bitcoin would willfully commit suicide.  Cranking the scale ahead of addressing scaliablity is/was controversial (not just among the most technical, though it's nearly universal there); but if it were strongly _necessary_, and better than the harm of not; then it would no longer be. That we're not there now, shows it isn't. QED.  And there is a tone of activity gone on to improve scalablity at all levels of the system, from micro optimizations, to protocol design.

In your view, do you think it's possible/probable that Gavin and Hearn have been compromised in some way, working for a different agenda than that which they started out with?

I'd actually like to know the answer to that as well. What is the real problem and how likely is it?

Andresen hasn't changed at all. It's been obvious from the beginning that his primary motivation is power, money, control and then some more power. Everything he's done from the media spotlight to centralizing control of Bitcoin in the hands of the foundation has been aimed at that. Refuse to agree with him and prepare to be attacked. I guess no one can remember his behavior during the BIP16/17 arguments. He's a sad little man that controlled Bitcoin's direction for too long.

[BTCBinary]

My opinion is that the source and original code shouldn't be messed with... The only change that would be needed to make would be one that could solve the blocksize and bloating problem. But that, many other altcoins already solved....

[hdbuck]

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bitcoin-mining-pool-f-pool-discus-fish-maintains-bip-not-an-option-1449003767

"Switching to BIP 101 or Bitcoin XT is a bad idea; we will never do that,” Chun reiterated his earlier position. “After a meeting with some other Chinese pools earlier this year, we proposed an 8-megabyte limit, because we thought Gavin's initial 20 megabyte proposal was too big for us. I always thought 2 megabytes would be better as a first step, but I did not want to offend Gavin with a 10 times smaller proposal. Gavin then answered us with BIP 101, which due to its steep growth curve is essentially 8 gigabytes, so it’s done. I don’t trust Gavin anymore – nor Hearn for that matter.”

XT rekt like Jeremy Corbyn  

1 MB rekt.

Chun, too, believes that raising the block-size limit is an urgent matter, explaining:

“I think it is urgent, because the transaction volume is increasing on the blockchain, and if the price rises in near future, it will push the transaction volume to be even higher. I think the max block size should be raised as soon as possible, but it should not be raised too much. Two megabytes is preferred as the first step.”

You'll get at least a doubled cap soonish. Not tonight dear, but 2016.

Inb4 "the conference is a 'fraud' that did not hold up to its 'promise' of raising teh blocksize!! blockstream core sensor ships & tyrannosaurus REKT our ph0rk wet dreams and rainbow pipes!!1"

[tl121]

From a little watching of my connection activity, I observed that a lot of the upload bandwidth was loading older blocks.  A limit on bandwidth provided for uploading older blocks would certainly help.

Implemented in Bitcoin Core git master a couple months ago, will be in 0.12; along with many other resource control tools. Though if widely used it will further congest getting blocks to begin with. It's a good trade-off, but not without costs. None of this is magic: cutting down this source of traffic or that is mostly just constant factor reductions. To operate the system needs a safety margin, and we're bumping up against actual limits.

It's good that instrumentation and controls are coming.  IMO they are a couple years late.

If done right, controls would not slow down getting current blocks.  These should get priority because the nodes requesting them are supporting the network.  If nodes coming back on line or, worse, initially loading, get worse service at times of peak network load this is perfectly reasonable, IMO.  (But I don't have any data, so I am forced to speculate.)  Initial loading should be only from well connected nodes that source historical data. There is no reason why the real-time network should be forced to do a job of bulk data transmission for free.  If this is a problem, there is no reason why these nodes couldn't charge for their service.  For example, AWS charges about $0.10 USD per Gigabyte.  It would be entirely reasonable to charge newbies a fee to offset these real costs.  Or a business can sell preloaded bitcoin disks, like the 21 Bitcoin Computer.

As to constant factors.  They are easily dismissed by theoreticians. Practical people who design, deploy, manage and operate businesses that provide cloud computing services live or die by small percentage changes in constant factors.  In this case, it appears that there are tremendous opportunities for two types of improvements here.  First, in reducing the amount of data that an operational node needs to transmit and receive, and second in tuning the nodes and their networking environment to effectively utilize the available resources.

[tl121]

Bigger blocks (with at least some reasonable upper bound) make spam attacks more expensive, as tx's drop out of the mempool and fees can be recycled continuously.

Not so much, in that the fee required to get into the mempool in the first place goes up as transactions are dropped out; at least with the limited mempool in 0.12.  To the extent that a bigger block makes spam attacks more expensive it's only really through the action of making it much cheaper to inflict additional storage-in-perpetuity on the network. So far, the non-trivially funded spam attacks that we've seen have not been successful in driving the feel levels required to bypass them above negligible cents per transaction levels (e.g. significantly cheaper than what credit card networks charge merchants per transaction).... though obviously this has limits.

Right now, measuring the differential time it takes for mining pools to switch the blocks they're working on vs block size suggests an effective transfer rate of 723kbit/sec (less shockingly slow when you consider how inefficient TCP is for bursty conditions across links with worldwide latency), This is the amount of time it took for a block to reach half the monitored public pool's stratum endpoints after reaching the first one vs blocksize:  https://people.xiph.org/~greg/sp2.png  (Matt more recently did a similar measurement of relay network behavior and reached a similar but somewhat lower throughput).   If you take that offset (2.491s) and data rate, and drop it into formula for subsidy income loss cost for the last byte of a megabyte block, the break-even feerate is 0.00045054 BTC/KB. So that suggests that at least lower hashrate miners are accepting transactions at a price low enough to be a net-loss currently. (It may not be the case; e.g. if the low hashrate miners are all fast. and the high hashrate miners are all slow, or low hashrate doesn't process as many transactions; and the data is all over the map... etc.)

Is there more data behind the plot?  It would be useful to look at the distribution and the performance for specific pools vs. the topology involved, including machines and link rates. (I can appreciate that some of this data may be proprietary or otherwise unavailable.)

As to the nexus between bandwidth and hash rate. There is no need for this.  I can speak from personal experience as a small scale miner.  Last summer I was solo mining with two S3s that I was still running despite the heat and managed to score a block on solo.ckpool.org.  The 0.5% fee was well worth it for use of a high bandwidth connection, because the orphan risk out of my DSL based home office would have been unacceptable.  (You might ask, why was I solo mining?  That's a another question, but it certainly looked like some of the pools had a consistent run of bad luck indicating that something was seriously wrong.)

[Patel]

From the AMA with Charlie Lee (Works at Coinbase) and Bobby Lee (Works at BTCC)

Are you in agreement about block size proposals, or is there any sibling rivalry? (BIP101, yay or nay?)

Will you be attending the Scaling Bitcoin conference?

Charlie:

We are more or less in agreement about the block size proposal, but coming from a different angle. We both think that we need to be very conservative about the block size increase. I'm more concerned about the larger blocksize causing decreasing in security and decentralization. And Bobby is concerned about the blockchain bloat causing individuals to not able to run Bitcoin nodes.

We are both against BIP101, as we feel like it's way too aggressive and dangerous.

We will be at Scaling Bitcoin.

Bobby:

If asked to choose, I would prefer BIP 100, and the main reason is that I think blocksize increases should be moderate and made with deliberate care and attention. It would be too aggressive to adhere to a fixed schedule of increase, given that network bandwidth does not improve as fast as storage capacity. If you think about it, block sizes affect two things: storage (the blockchain stored on your hard disk) and networking bandwidth (the sending around of blocks during confirmations). Historically, these two have both increased very fast, similar to Moore’s law, but the rates of increase has been dramatically different. So what will happen in 20 years? So we need to find the right tradeoff in deciding the block size.

I’m looking forward to attending Scaling Bitcoin in Hong Kong! I really wanted to attend the Montreal event, but couldn’t get away for that.

[brg444]

I'm curious why Charlie Lee has not been able to knock some sense into Brian Armstrong.



edit: actually I'm not.

[iCEBREAKER]

I'm curious why Charlie Lee has not been able to knock some sense into Brian Armstrong.

Pointy Headed CEOs do not listen to their Dilberts and Wallys (IE coders/engineers).

[brg444]

I'm curious why Charlie Lee has not been able to knock some sense into Brian Armstrong.

Pointy Headed CEOs do not listen to their Dilberts and Wallys (IE coders/engineers).

I'm pretty sure Brian is not calling the shots anymore anyway...

[danielW]

I'm curious why Charlie Lee has not been able to knock some sense into Brian Armstrong.



edit: actually I'm not.

There is a possibility that Armstrong wants to change leadership to root out the cypherpunk element. He might view it against his interests as someone who favours a cooperative  approach to working with government.

From his perspective getting rid of cypherpunks could make Bitcoin sellable to government and wall street, that is the environment he comes from.

When Maxwell implements things like Coinjoin and privacy, some people will simply see it as harder to sell to government and therefore bad for business. Actually Mike Hearn said something very similar about Coinjoin.

I dont know if he thinks like that but I am sure a lot of people do.

[marcus_of_augustus]

I'm curious why Charlie Lee has not been able to knock some sense into Brian Armstrong.



edit: actually I'm not.

There is a possibility that Armstrong wants to change leadership to root out the cypherpunk element. He might view it against his interests as someone who favours a cooperative  approach to working with government.

From his perspective getting rid of cypherpunks could make Bitcoin sellable to government and wall street, that is the environment he comes from.

When Maxwell implements things like Coinjoin and privacy, some people will simply see it as harder to sell to government and therefore bad for business. Actually Mike Hearn said something very similar about Coinjoin.

I dont know if he thinks like that but I am sure a lot of people do.

... not only is such thinking in denial of the philosophical roots of the technology they are also technically ignorant of the possibilities inherent in the underlying mathematics.

Do they seriously think they can control human thought, curiosity and invention with mere "governance" or "authority"? That would be sociopathic behaviour.

[Lauda]

50% of the hashrate strongly against BIP101. It is time to give up. This is not happening.

[MbccompanyX]

50% of the hashrate strongly against BIP101. It is time to give up. This is not happening.

sorry to tell this but the bip101 (and bitcoin xt) supporters will never really give up until their hashrate will be a total 0%.... this is what is clear, bip101 failed but people doesn't want to give up instead are more determined on doing more chaos

[Lauda]

sorry to tell this but the bip101 (and bitcoin xt) supporters will never really give up until their hashrate will be a total 0%....

It is already at 0% and has been like that for quite some time.

[MbccompanyX]

sorry to tell this but the bip101 (and bitcoin xt) supporters will never really give up until their hashrate will be a total 0%....

It is already at 0% and has been like that for quite some time.

well if is so i don't get why people still goes behind a dead protocol.... sounds something that at the end only harms instead of making stronger....

[RoadStress]

50% of the hashrate strongly against BIP101. It is time to give up. This is not happening.

I'm curious what will happen when miners will not be able to pay for their bills.

[Lauda]

I'm curious what will happen when miners will not be able to pay for their bills.

What are you implying by this? Unable to sell their coins or unable to earn enough by mining?
Update:
No ad hominem here, stop posting nonsense.

[valiz]

I'm curious what will happen when miners will not be able to pay for their bills.

This doesn't make any sense. I'm also curious what will happen when pigs will battle sheep for domination of the skies.

[btcusury]

In your view, do you think it's possible/probable that Gavin and Hearn have been compromised in some way, working for a different agenda than that which they started out with?

Andresen hasn't changed at all. It's been obvious from the beginning that his primary motivation is power, money, control and then some more power. Everything he's done from the media spotlight to centralizing control of Bitcoin in the hands of the foundation has been aimed at that. Refuse to agree with him and prepare to be attacked. I guess no one can remember his behavior during the BIP16/17 arguments. He's a sad little man that controlled Bitcoin's direction for too long.

That's my impression too, that he has some serious daddy issues (strong belief in authority, overwhelming desire for approval from perceived authority/father figures). Yet, when Satoshi left, he said that "it's in good hands with Gavin and the others". A severe error in judgment, or subsequent co-opting by perceived authority figures (e.g. CIA)?

The same question (of agenda/motivation) applies to Mike Hearn, who obviously is also a very strong believer in "authority", and seems to have no problem whatsoever with the banksters and their centralized debt-based money mega-scam.

I think tvbcof has a fascinating hypothesis about this:

I actively entertain the hypothesis that Hearn (and now Andresen to some extent) are associated with the shadowy Conformal entity who has their own clean-slate implementation of the Bitcoin protocol 'btcd'.  For a few months they were pushing pretty hard to have Bitcoin shift over to their implementation with the argument that it is 'better' in some ways (and I personally don't doubt that it is.)  'justusranvier' was most active in pushing it, but he seems to have disappeared from this forum.

If this hypothesis is basically valid then it would make a lot of sense for someone in Hearn's position to try to do as much damage to the 'satoshi-based' protocol support structures as possible on his way out the door.

Interesting... You may have noticed how, of the early/core developers, the most brown-nosing of perceived authority appear to be Hearn and Gavin... i.e. they are the most "conformal". These people cannot get their heads (or noses) out of the fatherly figure of the state, which cryptographic decentralization protocols like Bitcoin have emerged precisely to render technologically obsolete and irrelevant. Do you have a more developed theory or theoretical scenario of your hypothesis?