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

[QuestionAuthority]

Do we really have security and decentralization today when a few phone calls from the PRC could shut the whole thing down?

This is tangential ... but why do people assign so much influence to mining. All that would happen in that scenario is the hashing power goes down 70% or so and confirmations take a long time for about 2 weeks (until difficulty adjusts). Sucks but not end of Bitcoin.

Whats the worst that could really happen? Am I missing something?

You're missing the point that it would take much longer for that "two weeks" to happen at 30% hashing power.

There's a variety of ways something like this could be countered, but that's not the point, if a full scale nation state attack happened, it would likely be coordinated and fairly comprehensive. Our former trajectory forever changed.

The Chinese government could order the Chinese miners to only accept txs that are whitelisted (or not blacklisted) and to only mine on top of other China-approved blocks. Since the majority of the hashing power is in China, Bitcoin would become a China-controlled payment system at that point.

The only way to fix this would be an emergency hard fork, probably to change the POW. It might be that everyone would quickly come together on a hard fork. Or it might be that some parts of the community would veto a hard fork unless they got some other changes they wanted (e.g., BIP101).

It's also possible that some people would be OK with China making this decision. I see United Stations complaining about Coinbase for invading their privacy. Then others defend Coinbase as simply following government regulations. It's easy to imagine a similar divide if there were Chinese regulations on Bitcoin mining.

Right on cue for this discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3xnchr/rand_corporation_is_researching_how_to_destroy/

It's not just Rand. The Freemasons and illuminati have been working against Bitcoin from the beginning. They are being assisted by the aliens from crashed flying saucers kept at area-51. lol

[sgbett]

Anybody silly enough to run an XT node should just send all their coins directly to Uncle Sam now and bypass all the formalities, stress and hassle that lies along that route.

The few people running XT nodes (I imagine) do so in protest of the consensus paralysis experienced by the reference implementation. Stasis requires one vote, evolution requires all votes, an unnatural arrangement. There is a relief valve, and some have already grabbed it. 

That is exactly why I run XT node(s). I'm just an old man yelling at a cloud.

I bought something with bitcoin today because I was surprised to discover at checkout that it was an option.

I was pleased that I could spend my bitcoin on goods, despite ongoing attempts to undermine that use case.

Settlement layer my ass, just as information wants to be free, so bitcoin wants to be money. All the governments in the world aren't going to stop it, and neither is a group of devs. Bitcoin will be what it will be and attempts to constrain it will fail, arguing about blocksize is a red herring. Honey badger don't care.

[brg444]

Anybody silly enough to run an XT node should just send all their coins directly to Uncle Sam now and bypass all the formalities, stress and hassle that lies along that route.

The few people running XT nodes (I imagine) do so in protest of the consensus paralysis experienced by the reference implementation. Stasis requires one vote, evolution requires all votes, an unnatural arrangement. There is a relief valve, and some have already grabbed it.  

That is exactly why I run XT node(s). I'm just an old man yelling at a cloud.

I bought something with bitcoin today because I was surprised to discover at checkout that it was an option.

I was pleased that I could spend my bitcoin on goods, despite ongoing attempts to undermine that use case.

Settlement layer my ass, just as information wants to be free, so bitcoin wants to be money. All the governments in the world aren't going to stop it, and neither is a group of devs. Bitcoin will be what it will be and attempts to constrain it will fail, arguing about blocksize is a red herring. Honey badger don't care.

Indeed, Core has already moved past this issue and is moving on to better, more intelligent scaling solutions.

No contentious hard fork is getting merged.

On Tue, Dec 8, 2015 at 6:07 AM, Wladimir J. van der Laan wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 07, 2015 at 10:02:17PM +0000, Gregory Maxwell via bitcoin-dev
wrote:
>> TL;DR: I propose we work immediately towards the segwit 4MB block
>> soft-fork which increases capacity and scalability, and recent speedups
>> and incoming relay improvements make segwit a reasonable risk. BIP9
>> and segwit will also make further improvements easier and faster to
>> deploy. We’ll continue to set the stage for non-bandwidth-increase-based
>> scaling, while building additional tools that would make bandwidth
>> increases safer long term. Further work will prepare Bitcoin for further
>> increases, which will become possible when justified, while also
providing
>> the groundwork to make them justifiable.
>
> Sounds good to me.

Better late than never, let me comment on why I believe pursuing this plan is important.

For months, the block size debate, and the apparent need for agreement on a hardfork has distracted from needed engineering work, fed the external impression that nothing is being done, and generally created a toxic environment to work in. It has affected my own productivity and health, and I do not think I am alone.

I believe that soft-fork segwit can help us out of this deadlock and get us going again. It does not require the pervasive assumption that the entire world will simultaneously switch to new consensus rules like a hardfork does, while at the same time:
* Give a short-term capacity bump
* Show the world that scalability is being worked on
* Actually improve scalability (as opposed to just scale) by reducingbandwidth/storage and indirectly improving the effectiveness of systems like Lightning.
* Solve several unrelated problems at the same time (fraud proofs, script extensibility, malleability, ...).

So I'd like to ask the community that we work towards this plan, as it allows to make progress without being forced to make a possibly divisive choice for one hardfork or another yet.

--
Pieter

The rest can fork off to their own altcoins for all I care.

By the way, a more important red herring, one you are yourself guilty of entertaining, is the premise that Core is responsible for the network's inaction in raising the block size.

Of course Core has no control over the code being run by Bitcoin peers and so it is a network wide decision that supports the existing status quo.

Again, if you find yourself in disagreement you are free to move ahead with your own altcoin.

[tvbcof]

It's not just Rand. The Freemasons and illuminati have been working against Bitcoin from the beginning. ...

Generally speaking, and using your short-hand notation, it's more the case that the former commissions the latter for projects such as this.

The suggestion, though, is not outside of reason.  The first thing I did before taking a position was to put some effort into 'figuring out how to destroy Bitcoin.'  I suspect that a lot of people who have something on the line (e.g., a lot of money/power tied up in debt-based monetary regimes) would do the same.

Early on we did see some panic on the parts of some of the monied interests and their tools.  I think it was some politician who characterized Bitcoin as something like 'a unique form of domestic terrorism.'  That sentiment 'went dark' to my surprise.  A direct assault on Bitcoin in those early times was one of the things I was hoping for.  The effect would have been to drive Bitcoin underground and make it focus on defensibility and hardening.  The result of that would have been that here in 2016 we would have had a Bitcoin with broader distribution in terms of infrastructure support and one which was more robust (at least optionally) at the protocol level.  And one with a lot fewer dip-shits in the userbase.  Ah well.  The downside would have been that I probably could not have taken my first payout up in the four-figure zone and I've enjoyed the funds that this opportunity provided.

At the end of the day, I have developed significantly more respect for the capabilities of 'our' adversaries.  There were a lot of dumb mistakes that they did not make.

[sgbett]

Anybody silly enough to run an XT node should just send all their coins directly to Uncle Sam now and bypass all the formalities, stress and hassle that lies along that route.

The few people running XT nodes (I imagine) do so in protest of the consensus paralysis experienced by the reference implementation. Stasis requires one vote, evolution requires all votes, an unnatural arrangement. There is a relief valve, and some have already grabbed it.  

That is exactly why I run XT node(s). I'm just an old man yelling at a cloud.

I bought something with bitcoin today because I was surprised to discover at checkout that it was an option.

I was pleased that I could spend my bitcoin on goods, despite ongoing attempts to undermine that use case.

Settlement layer my ass, just as information wants to be free, so bitcoin wants to be money. All the governments in the world aren't going to stop it, and neither is a group of devs. Bitcoin will be what it will be and attempts to constrain it will fail, arguing about blocksize is a red herring. Honey badger don't care.

Indeed, Core has already moved past this issue and is moving on to better, more intelligent scaling solutions.

No contentious hard fork is getting merged.

On Tue, Dec 8, 2015 at 6:07 AM, Wladimir J. van der Laan wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 07, 2015 at 10:02:17PM +0000, Gregory Maxwell via bitcoin-dev
wrote:
>> TL;DR: I propose we work immediately towards the segwit 4MB block
>> soft-fork which increases capacity and scalability, and recent speedups
>> and incoming relay improvements make segwit a reasonable risk. BIP9
>> and segwit will also make further improvements easier and faster to
>> deploy. We’ll continue to set the stage for non-bandwidth-increase-based
>> scaling, while building additional tools that would make bandwidth
>> increases safer long term. Further work will prepare Bitcoin for further
>> increases, which will become possible when justified, while also
providing
>> the groundwork to make them justifiable.
>
> Sounds good to me.

Better late than never, let me comment on why I believe pursuing this plan is important.

For months, the block size debate, and the apparent need for agreement on a hardfork has distracted from needed engineering work, fed the external impression that nothing is being done, and generally created a toxic environment to work in. It has affected my own productivity and health, and I do not think I am alone.

I believe that soft-fork segwit can help us out of this deadlock and get us going again. It does not require the pervasive assumption that the entire world will simultaneously switch to new consensus rules like a hardfork does, while at the same time:
* Give a short-term capacity bump
* Show the world that scalability is being worked on
* Actually improve scalability (as opposed to just scale) by reducingbandwidth/storage and indirectly improving the effectiveness of systems like Lightning.
* Solve several unrelated problems at the same time (fraud proofs, script extensibility, malleability, ...).

So I'd like to ask the community that we work towards this plan, as it allows to make progress without being forced to make a possibly divisive choice for one hardfork or another yet.

--
Pieter

The rest can fork off to their own altcoins for all I care.

By the way, a more important red herring, one you are yourself guilty of entertaining, is the premise that Core is responsible for the network's inaction in raising the block size.

Of course Core has no control over the code being run by Bitcoin peers and so it is a network wide decision that supports the existing status quo.

Again, if you find yourself in disagreement you are free to move ahead with your own altcoin.

I didn't say what you think I said but as you;ve brought it back to block size, I'm just as pleased as the next person that core is implementing "bigger" blocks.

A bigger increase than I thought we would get this go around, but there you have it! Of course until its actually in the code, its still just chatter, so I'll carry on yelling at the cloud

Then once it gets committed there will be at least one (more) data point where someone moved from XT back to core!

[johnyj]

On Tue, Dec 8, 2015 at 6:07 AM, Wladimir J. van der Laan wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 07, 2015 at 10:02:17PM +0000, Gregory Maxwell via bitcoin-dev
wrote:
>> TL;DR: I propose we work immediately towards the segwit 4MB block
>> soft-fork which increases capacity and scalability, and recent speedups
>> and incoming relay improvements make segwit a reasonable risk. BIP9
>> and segwit will also make further improvements easier and faster to
>> deploy. We’ll continue to set the stage for non-bandwidth-increase-based
>> scaling, while building additional tools that would make bandwidth
>> increases safer long term. Further work will prepare Bitcoin for further
>> increases, which will become possible when justified, while also
providing
>> the groundwork to make them justifiable.
>
> Sounds good to me.

Better late than never, let me comment on why I believe pursuing this plan is important.

For months, the block size debate, and the apparent need for agreement on a hardfork has distracted from needed engineering work, fed the external impression that nothing is being done, and generally created a toxic environment to work in. It has affected my own productivity and health, and I do not think I am alone.

I believe that soft-fork segwit can help us out of this deadlock and get us going again. It does not require the pervasive assumption that the entire world will simultaneously switch to new consensus rules like a hardfork does, while at the same time:
* Give a short-term capacity bump
* Show the world that scalability is being worked on
* Actually improve scalability (as opposed to just scale) by reducingbandwidth/storage and indirectly improving the effectiveness of systems like Lightning.
* Solve several unrelated problems at the same time (fraud proofs, script extensibility, malleability, ...).

So I'd like to ask the community that we work towards this plan, as it allows to make progress without being forced to make a possibly divisive choice for one hardfork or another yet.

--
Pieter

SW does not reduce the network traffic, a full node would still need all the data it requires to verify the trade, just now these data are separated so that the block can contain more data when signatures are moved outside of the block, thus 1MB block can contain more transactions. It is just a re-organize of how data is stored in database. So this is an emergency solution to deal with the fear of full block and no hard fork block size increase

But we already had full blocks twice in July's attack and October's attack, and nothing serious happened. So why not let blocks become full again with real traffic and see how it looks like. I think a consensus is much easier to reach when everyone is experiencing the same problem in reality, not just some imaginary problem claimed by different devs

To be able to directly use the blockchain by anyone is very important, it is this make people feel having 100% control over their money. But for how large amount is to be debated. You won't use it for cents of transaction, a waste of time. So I think there will be a minimum transaction threshold on-chain, and no such limit off-chain, so people still have options

[VeritasSapere]

Allowing the blocks to become consistently full will render transacting on the Bitcoin network more unreliable and expensive. This should not be considered a good thing this early in Bitcoins development, especially considering that adoption is tantamount to increasing the security and decentralization of the network.

Furthermore it is not just the case that we will have to be pay more for transacting, but that there will not be enough space for everyone to transact regardless of the fee that we pay. Since under such a model most average users would not be able to compete with payments processors, banks and other large institutions over block space. However I do not believe that it would even get to that point in the first place, since firstly we would fork before that happened, and secondly I do not believe such a system would gain sufficient adoption especially compared to superior alternatives that would exist concurrently in the free market.

Again, a fee market does not fix this, a fee market simply priorities who is able to use Bitcoin and who is not able to use Bitcoin. There are losers in a fee market that become priced out.

Transaction-fee levels are not in any general need of being artificially pushed upward. A 130-year transition phase was planned into Bitcoin during which the full transition from block reward revenue to transaction-fee revenue was to take place.

It is a valid and rational economic choice to subsidize the system with lower fees in the beginning. Many miners, for example, openly state they prefer long term system growth over maximizing tiny amounts of current day income.

Higher Service prices can negatively impact system security. Bitcoin depends on a virtuous cycle of users boosting and maintaining bitcoin's network effect, incentivizing miners, increasing security. Higher prices that reduce bitcoin's user count and network effect can have the opposite impact.

Further, wallet software User experience is very, very poor in a hyper-competitive fee market.

[brg444]

However I do not believe that it would even get to that point in the first place, since firstly we would fork before that happened, and secondly I do not believe such a system would gain sufficient adoption especially compared to superior alternatives that would exist concurrently in the free market.

Please, by all means, fork away.

There is no competition to Bitcoin. The block size limit is there to keep it that way.

[QuestionAuthority]

It's not just Rand. The Freemasons and illuminati have been working against Bitcoin from the beginning. ...

Generally speaking, and using your short-hand notation, it's more the case that the former commissions the latter for projects such as this.

The suggestion, though, is not outside of reason.  The first thing I did before taking a position was to put some effort into 'figuring out how to destroy Bitcoin.'  I suspect that a lot of people who have something on the line (e.g., a lot of money/power tied up in debt-based monetary regimes) would do the same.

Early on we did see some panic on the parts of some of the monied interests and their tools.  I think it was some politician who characterized Bitcoin as something like 'a unique form of domestic terrorism.'  That sentiment 'went dark' to my surprise.  A direct assault on Bitcoin in those early times was one of the things I was hoping for.  The effect would have been to drive Bitcoin underground and make it focus on defensibility and hardening.  The result of that would have been that here in 2016 we would have had a Bitcoin with broader distribution in terms of infrastructure support and one which was more robust (at least optionally) at the protocol level.  And one with a lot fewer dip-shits in the userbase.  Ah well.  The downside would have been that I probably could not have taken my first payout up in the four-figure zone and I've enjoyed the funds that this opportunity provided.

At the end of the day, I have developed significantly more respect for the capabilities of 'our' adversaries.  There were a lot of dumb mistakes that they did not make.

I've never bought into that whole secret society controlling everything BS. It's no secret, we know exactly who's controlling everything and it isn't us. Business interests don't need secret back room meetings or a bunch of old dinosaurs wearing silly looking fez hats with secret handshakes when encrypted email is available.

Business interests don't attack or look to destroy anything at first. They look at how they can profit from it then slowly rape it out of existence using a profit model. That's the reason our water and air are polluted, we're running out of trees and every bite of food we put in our mouths is thinned with GMO soybeans. Hidden? Secret? No, more like transparent as hell.

[tl121]

Do we really have security and decentralization today when a few phone calls from the PRC could shut the whole thing down?

This is tangential ... but why do people assign so much influence to mining. All that would happen in that scenario is the hashing power goes down 70% or so and confirmations take a long time for about 2 weeks (until difficulty adjusts). Sucks but not end of Bitcoin.

Whats the worst that could really happen? Am I missing something?

With the reduced hashrate, blocks would take longer and it would take about 3 weeks before the difficulty could be adjusted. During this period, the average time to the next block would be longer, so if there were no backlog the average time to confirm would be increased by 40%.  Neither of these would be catastrophic.

However, the capacity of the network to carry transactions would also be reduced by 70%, based on the block limit.  If the load on the network had been humming along at 60% of capacity (like at present) then the network would be dumped into gross overload and many transactions would not get confirmed at all for weeks.  Note that this catastrophic failure would not occur without the block limit limiting capacity.  It would be perfectly reasonable to say that this catastrophic failure was caused by the block limit. 

[Master of Puppets]

"Gavincoin" #rekt

CIA needs new puppet. This one is used up.

[danielW]

Do we really have security and decentralization today when a few phone calls from the PRC could shut the whole thing down?

This is tangential ... but why do people assign so much influence to mining. All that would happen in that scenario is the hashing power goes down 70% or so and confirmations take a long time for about 2 weeks (until difficulty adjusts). Sucks but not end of Bitcoin.

Whats the worst that could really happen? Am I missing something?

With the reduced hashrate, blocks would take longer and it would take about 3 weeks before the difficulty could be adjusted. During this period, the average time to the next block would be longer, so if there were no backlog the average time to confirm would be increased by 40%.  Neither of these would be catastrophic.

However, the capacity of the network to carry transactions would also be reduced by 70%, based on the block limit.  If the load on the network had been humming along at 60% of capacity (like at present) then the network would be dumped into gross overload and many transactions would not get confirmed at all for weeks.  Note that this catastrophic failure would not occur without the block limit limiting capacity.  It would be perfectly reasonable to say that this catastrophic failure was caused by the block limit.  

ohh dont bring blocksize into it. We are talking about extreme one-off even that will make Bitcoin much less usable for a few weeks anyhow. Its hardly an argument to have very big blocks.

[danielW]

Anyhow its ironic and funny, when browsing the XT sub-reddit to see a regular appearance of people complaining about the difficulty of running their node.

Running XT is equivalent to saying 'Lets vote to take away our vote'. The voting being done by running nodes, with XT supporters not having a problem if in the future only larger entities can run nodes in datacenters. (and yes nodes do vote because ultimately its them who have the power and miners have no choice but to mine blocks that economic consensus considers valid).

XT is actually an example of the need for easy to run nodes. Like Peter Todd said, I don't agree with XTs specific goals but the ability to do what they are trying to do needs to be there.
 

On the front page right now (and there have been many other instances of similar threads in past):

https://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoinxt/comments/3xke53/default_settings_should_not_crash_bitcoinxtd_on_a/

https://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoinxt/comments/3xmmko/throttling_my_xt_nodes_cpu_usage/


Not from xt subreddit but still:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3xp22r/fully_synced_bitcoin_core_is_using_50_cpu_is/


In the meantime core developers are constantly giving real improvements to scalability, as opposed to simplistic 'speed limit increase' masquerading as scalability solution of XT.

[johnyj]

People used to describe bitcoin as digital gold, but it seems no one complains that gold can only do 0 transactions per second, and maybe average gold holder do one transaction every 10 years or more, it still worth over $1000 per ounce

I believe people don't need so much transaction capacity, there are just so many ways to do transactions. However, they need a trustworthy monetary system that do not print money out of thin air, and there is none except bitcoin

See this post: Why even use BitCoins?
It seems new users always wondered why should they use bitcoin to do transaction, so the transaction demand will always be the least to worry

[brg444]

The lolcows are unusually agitated since Core's most recent show of strength.

Behold here Peter R Rizun, Managing Editor of the Ledger academic publication, openly lobbying Gavin to.... you guessed it..... censor the contributors out of the Bitcoin Core repo.

[BlindMayorBitcorn]

The lolcows are unusually agitated since Core's most recent show of strength.

Behold here Peter R Rizun, Managing Editor of the Ledger academic publication, openly lobbying Gavin to.... you guessed it..... censor the contributors out of the Bitcoin Core repo.

Does Gavin have this power??

[brg444]

Does Gavin have this power??
[/quote]

pretty certain that's a no

[danielW]

The lolcows are unusually agitated since Core's most recent show of strength.

Behold here Peter R Rizun, Managing Editor of the Ledger academic publication, openly lobbying Gavin to.... you guessed it..... censor the contributors out of the Bitcoin Core repo.

Does Gavin have this power??

Is Peter talking about the Bitcoin core repo? or about XT repo or some other repo?

I cant believe he is suggesting to try and shut down Bitcoin core repo, if that is the case ... These people  

[brg444]

Is Peter talking about the Bitcoin core repo? or about XT repo or some other repo?

I cant believe he is suggesting to try and shut down Bitcoin core repo, if that is the case ... These people  

They actually think they can hijack the Repo  

https://bitco.in/forum/threads/gold-collapsing-bitcoin-up.16/page-188#post-6819

[Patel]

I would put money on the fact that Peter R is probably being paid by someone who wants to kill Bitcoin's decentralization.