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

[iCEBREAKER]

Hey, Icebreaker, you and cypherdick were on the same side during the HF scam.  Now you're on opposite sides of the XT drama.  How'd that happen?  I haven't noticed any direct attacks by you against cypherdick during the XT fight, but maybe I've missed them.  Any comment?

We're still on the same side in l'affaire HF, but the Great Schism has driven us apart otherwise.  Civil wars entail turning brother against brother.  If you check Frap.doc's locked thread, you see multiple pages of us directly attacking each other.

It was all in good fun, but he's being a very sore loser about XT's ignoble fate of being tossed away like yesterday's jam.

Hopefully he'll get bored of triangle jerking with Solex and PeterR on their forum of misfit Gavinistas, and come back to us.  I believe some day we'll laugh (over a few beers) about our never-ending "giant nerd coder drama fest."   

[Peter R]

Peter,

can we agree that there is no universal law that says "blocks must be full to pay for security"
even if it was said on Reddit?

 

Haha there's certainly no universal law that says that.

However, I should mention that there is still one edge case that is not understood regarding security…and it won't matter till we're all dead anyways…but no one has rigorously shown what happens when the block reward goes away in terms of the equilibrium hash power securing the Blockchain.  I think I can show that the hashing power does not fall to zero in a free market with zero inflation, but I'm not there yet.  

[knight22]

Peter,

can we agree that there is no universal law that says "blocks must be full to pay for security"
even if it was said on Reddit?

 

Indeed. Some argue that a cap is required to create an artificial transaction scarcity for people to pay fees. The thing is, miners resources ARE scarce (electricity + bandwidth). Miners are free to drop transactions with too low fees and mine blocks smaller than the maximum allowed if it becomes uneconomical for them or if their hardware does not support the volume incurring. This will creates a fee market even if blocks would have no limit at all. Miners will compete to get the cheaper electricity and best bandwidth allowing fees to be as low as possible based on a competitive environment depending on transaction volume and miners resources.

It just makes perfect sense.

[tvbcof]

...
It was all in good fun, but he's [cyphercoc] being a very sore loser about XT's ignoble fate of being tossed away like yesterday's jam.

Hopefully he'll get bored of triangle jerking with Solex and PeterR on their forum of misfit Gavinistas, and come back to us.  I believe some day we'll laugh (over a few beers) about our never-ending "giant nerd coder drama fest."  

Hopefully not.  Bitcoin price is on the increase.  It would be a shame if cypherdick came back there where he has a voice several decibels above that of a house-mouse and fucked it up for us hodlers again.

By his original handle 'cypherdoc' he is widely known and hopeless rekt ass-clown now so if he was not smart enough to have created a few sock puppets back in the day he'll have to come crawling back as a newbie.  If he's not tied up in court trying to hold on to the 3000 BTC which once belonged to those hoping to get Hashfast gear in time for it to do anything worthwhile that is.

[RoadTrain]

Many of the small-blockers thinks that because "demand for block space can be considered infinite," that we need a block size limit to keep blocks from becoming arbitrarily large. There's a quote by Revalin that "Bitcoin is the Devil's way of teaching geeks economics."  This is certainly true in this case, because the economists resolved the paradox of "infinite demand" over 100 years ago.  

Indeed, demand can be considered infinite, but only as the price of the commodity tends to zero.  As the price increases, the quantity demanded decreases.  This is known as the Law of Demand.  

In the case of Bitcoin, the cost to produce block space grows exponentially with the size of the block (source) due to the increased chances of orphaning a larger block.  This means that the supply curve always intersects the demand curve at a finite block size.  This is the reason the transaction fee market exists without a block size limit.  

It's basically just another way of saying that there's nothing special about the new economic commodity called "block space."  The Laws of Supply and Demand apply like the do for other commodities.  

Is it safe to say that this comment is based on your own unfinished paper? I've read discussion on the mailing list, and there seem to be some significant drawbacks in it.
Excuse me if I'm incorrect, but I guess that the main argument for a fee market existing without a blocksize limit is that the block data needed to be transmitted scales linearly with the block size. I don't think this is true, as there are technical solutions making block propagation practically O(1). I admit that theoretically costs of transactions may be non-zero (my knowledge on the subject is superficial atm), but practically it doesn't matter as it's close enough to it to conclude that a healthy (i.e. capable of funding miners) fee market cannot exist there without serious deformations of the system.

[DooMAD]

wtf? like we care about what miners want..

i mean duhhh this is no news that (big) miners want bigger blocks so they can try at control the network..

but it wont happen under such circonstances.

so how about you n00b gtf(ork)o because we are rejoicing here.  

Well I hope the miners are seeing this.  The asset-class #rektum brigade don't care about miners, but still genuinely believe the miners will stick around to be their bitch and validate their occasional transactions when they aren't hodling.  Yeah, good luck with that sales pitch.  

Again, you could stop overreacting for a second and think about this more carefully.  Recognise the fact that (as you claim you understand) the incentives for the miners and the wider network have to align and you need the miners.  Recognise the fact that you aren't going to get another chance to compromise if you blow this one.  Recognise the fact that a permanent 1mb blocksize is untenable in an open source coin.  If you genuinely want a small blocksize, you need to get behind a compromise proposal that others can support.  

You can do this the easy way, or the hard way.  Choose carefully.

You are the one always overreacting, phagocytizing the (non) debate with you fallacies, and talking about things you dont qualify to grasp..

Im not a 1MB 4eva lulz cheering noob. I'm a timing, data and testing advocate. (which is all what BIP000 is about)

Miners get to mine something valuable because we, the (ACTUAL!) users, gives it its value.

So I sure hope they get to see what im saying because any power grab attempt on their behalf is going to result as a BITCOIN PRICE FALL, the same way it fell when Ghash.io had about 50% of hashrate, rememba?

(And the same way it fell when gavin was at his ATH "governance" BS with his XT fork buddy hearn)


So to get things clear for your twisted little brainwashed socialist mind, maybe try connect the dots here:

CONSENSUS > DECENTRALIZATION > SECURITY >VALUE

now if you dont get it from here, ima just put you on ignore, so you wont cry after me being so mean on you clueless noob.

I don't have any particular quarrels with any of that.  Again, in case you missed it, I agree with you that centralisation will likely be an issue in future if this is not handled correctly.  But now allow me to elucidate for you as to the monumental lapse in judgement you've made.  You have placed all your focus on derailing BIP101.  Here's the sum total of what you've achieved:

• You've painted yourselves into a corner and left no margin to negotiate,

but worse than that,

• You've left the door wide open for BIP100

Like, wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiide open.  Let me spell it out for you in no uncertain terms.  Character assassinations of Gavin and Mike do not get you a better proposal.  Ridiculing XT does not get you a better proposal.  Stupid troll threads and memes like "gavinistas" and "#rekt" do not get you a better proposal.  Calling everyone "clueless noobs" does not get you a better proposal.  It gets you BIP100.  Carte blanche for the miners.  Stop butting heads with me for just a moment and consider BIP100 for the threat it represents to decentralisation.

Message received, you don't like BIP101.  We get it.  But for all the things you've said about BIP101, the one thing you can't deny is that it's still an algorithmic proposal that doesn't hand total control to the miners on a silver platter.  The point has already been conceded that some miners will obviously want bigger blocks and that bigger blocks will lead to centralisation.  We are both on the same page at this point, so we must have some common ground in believing BIP100 is not the correct solution.  

In hindsight, you would have been far more sensible to work with the community and curtail the increases proposed by BIP101 to something more reasonable that was still controlled algorithmically.  Instead you chose to torpedo it with reckless abandon, creating a rift and resulting in a small number of you standing in stark contrast to the rest of the community.  Please compromise.  Or we'll be stuck with BIP100.

I am increasingly doubtful of dynamic proposals for two reasons: they can be gamed by miners and they don't address the actual problem of cost externalization to nodes.

On the same topic as the first part of my post, consider which is worse:

• A system where miners have to expend considerable time and resources to have a chance at gaming the system to manipulate a blocksize that benefits them (dynamic blocksize),

or

• A system where miners have to expend zero time and resources to simply snap their fingers and select a blocksize that benefits them (BIP100)

Would have thought the answer was pretty obvious.

Are you going to continue to decry a reasonable and controlled increase, effectively drawing a line in the sand and allowing BIP100 to go ahead unchallenged?  The tactics you've employed to derail BIP101 won't work against BIP100, so again, you need to consider your options very carefully.  Stop the trolling and FUD and start working with the rest of the community to find an agreeable proposal that isn't BIP100 and miners beginning to act more like central bankers dictating monetary policy.  No one wants that (except maybe the largest of the mining pools).

Still like getting blood from a stone with you guys.  FFS listen to reason already.  


COMPROMISE.

[Zarathustra]

...
It was all in good fun, but he's [cyphercoc] being a very sore loser about XT's ignoble fate of being tossed away like yesterday's jam.

Hopefully he'll get bored of triangle jerking with Solex and PeterR on their forum of misfit Gavinistas, and come back to us.  I believe some day we'll laugh (over a few beers) about our never-ending "giant nerd coder drama fest."  

Hopefully not.  Bitcoin price is on the increase.  It would be a shame if cypherdick came back there where he has a voice several decibels above that of a house-mouse and fucked it up for us hodlers again.

By his original handle 'cypherdoc' he is widely known and hopeless rekt ass-clown now so if he was not smart enough to have created a few sock puppets back in the day he'll have to come crawling back as a newbie.  If he's not tied up in court trying to hold on to the 3000 BTC which once belonged to those hoping to get Hashfast gear in time for it to do anything worthwhile that is.

Once a sick stalker - always a sick stalker.
The bitcoin price is on the increase because BIP101 triggered several proposals to increase the block size limit. Nobody is taking the 1MB'ers seriously anymore.

[Lauda]

It seems like any of the proposals would work and it's turned into a big head game. Why don't they just take the cap out completely? It was put in to avoid spamming the blockchain. Obviously we're not worried about spam any longer or they wouldn't raise it at all. If we are still worried about spam then that problem will just reappear in a few years after a bunch of the increases go into effect. I still don't get all the excitement about it. Seems like much ado about nothing.

Well anything properly coded and implemented would work, so that is not the case. We can not take the cap out and we would be doing something very risky (fee market, spam, etc.). XT was probably created as a programmed fork for the sole reason of taking over power. It was never really about the block size debate.
As far as all the proposals are concerned, some people (with the knowledge; e.g. developers) are very concerned about potential problems and centralization. We can't just risk a $3+Bn market with something that was never properly tested. I favor a block size increase (to a certain degree), and I favor dynamically changing blocks (however, I do not support the proposed halving and doubling in BIP105).

[hdbuck]

It seems like any of the proposals would work and it's turned into a big head game. Why don't they just take the cap out completely? It was put in to avoid spamming the blockchain. Obviously we're not worried about spam any longer or they wouldn't raise it at all. If we are still worried about spam then that problem will just reappear in a few years after a bunch of the increases go into effect. I still don't get all the excitement about it. Seems like much ado about nothing.

Well anything properly coded and implemented would work, so that is not the case. We can not take the cap out and we would be doing something very risky (fee market, spam, etc.). XT was probably created as a programmed fork for the sole reason of taking over power. It was never really about the block size debate.
As far as all the proposals are concerned, some people (with the knowledge; e.g. developers) are very concerned about potential problems and centralization. We can't just risk a $3+Bn market with something that was never properly tested. I favor a block size increase (to a certain degree), and I favor dynamically changing blocks (however, I do not support the proposed halving and doubling in BIP105).

Not sure if i remember correctly (kinda lost track of the forkers wannabees) but it seems your personnal view on the matter has somehow evolved from stupid fork urge to a more sensitive opinion. If so, i thank you for your intellectual honesty, and welcome on board on the side of reason.

Ps: ever heard of bip000? No fud, much sense there.

[Lauda]

Not sure if i remember correctly (kinda lost track of the forkers wannabees) but it seems your personnal view on the matter has somehow evolved from stupid fork urge to a more sensitive opinion. If so, i thank you for your intellectual honesty, and welcome on board on the side of reason.

Ps: ever heard of bip000? No fud, much sense there.

That is not correct, you must have mistaken me with someone. I was never in support of XT nor of the "urgency" for increasing the block size limit. I was always strongly against XT and have tried to properly explain why it was a bad idea (I admit, I probably did unintentionally made some bad posts along the way). Just as you've said, it is hard to remember everything and everyone's opinions.

DooMAD's opinion has however changes to a more sensitive opinion. Looking at the current proposals, I'd say that a mixture of BIP100 and BIP105 would result in the best possible solution (read first part of sentence again). Yes, I've also heard of BIP000 on reddit.

[acerkake]

#AgainstBitcoinXT

It's against the philosophy of Bitcoin. A better option but still not ideal is to soft fork with the extended blocks. Gmaxwell knows what hes talking about

[hdbuck]

Not sure if i remember correctly (kinda lost track of the forkers wannabees) but it seems your personnal view on the matter has somehow evolved from stupid fork urge to a more sensitive opinion. If so, i thank you for your intellectual honesty, and welcome on board on the side of reason.

Ps: ever heard of bip000? No fud, much sense there.

That is not correct, you must have mistaken me with someone. I was never in support of XT nor of the "urgency" for increasing the block size limit. I was always strongly against XT and have tried to properly explain why it was a bad idea (I admit, I probably did unintentionally made some bad posts along the way). Just as you've said, it is hard to remember everything and everyone's opinions.

DooMAD's opinion has however changes to a more sensitive opinion. Looking at the current proposals, I'd say that a mixture of BIP100 and BIP105 would result in the best possible solution (read first part of sentence again). Yes, I've also heard of BIP000 on reddit.

ok my bad, so what do you think of bip000?

As per your mixing view of BIP100 and BIP105, wouldn't you agree that before having such discussion, it would be better to actually witness how the market/miners perform as the network actually grows?
And by that i dont mean spam attacking it to push for some quick fix that hasnt been tested or properly discussed, which should take a while if we take into consideration the very fragile equilibrium that has brought us up until now.

[brg444]

Adam's block extension gives both sides exactly what they want.

I'm not sure why it didn't get more traction.

[Lauda]

ok my bad, so what do you think of bip000?

As per your mixing view of BIP100 and BIP105, wouldn't you agree that before having such discussion, it would be better to actually witness how the market/miners perform as the network actually grows?
And by that i dont mean spam attacking it to push for some quick fix that hasnt been tested or properly discussed, which should take a while if we take into consideration the very fragile equilibrium that has brought us up until now.

Well I do not partially agree with BIP000. Even though there is currently nothing wrong with Bitcoin, that does not mean that it should not change nor evolve. Basically, with the halving coming in less than a year we can not know what will happen. There is a huge potential for additional growth around it, however if Bitcoin is unable to handle it then we lose out on this opportunity. I would say that we need to work on possible solutions to make enough room for potential growth.
There's nothing wrong with discussing anything before other things happen. Besides, before we actually see some implementation enough time will pass to see how the network is going to handle the remaining months of 2015.

Adam's block extension gives both sides exactly what they want.

I'm not sure why it didn't get more traction.

I'd say complexity and the fact that there are no threads about it in this very section. If you want to talk about it, then go ahead and open a new thread. I'll join as well.

[fencer11]

Could someone explain to me in non technical terms why Bitcoin XT would hurt the Bitcoin community if it gained the majoority of the vote?

[jonald_fyookball]

Peter,

can we agree that there is no universal law that says "blocks must be full to pay for security"
even if it was said on Reddit?

 

Haha there's certainly no universal law that says that.

However, I should mention that there is still one edge case that is not understood regarding security…and it won't matter till we're all dead anyways…but no one has rigorously shown what happens when the block reward goes away in terms of the equilibrium hash power securing the Blockchain.  I think I can show that the hashing power does not fall to zero in a free market with zero inflation, but I'm not there yet.  

It seems to be a complex question, which is probably why no one has rigorously show it.

There's an interesting dynamic based on the number of pools operating.  If there were only a few
large pools, then many people would pay the minimum that any of the major pools accept and
wait till they solve a block.  On the other hand, if there were a great number of small pools,
then people could be waiting an unacceptably long time before the smallest fee pool solves
a block.  That scenario would mitigate the price wars because it would disincentivize users
from price shopping fees and instead compel them to simply include a reasonable round number fee
(although pools would still be left with the dillema of where to set prices
and what to include).  

A recent article points to shrinking pool size:
http://cointelegraph.com/news/114918/new-cornell-paper-suggests-mining-pools-will-shrink-in-size

However, even if large pools existed, and one started dropping their fees, miners would be incentivized
to leave the pool for a higher fee pool!

Also, another interesting aspect of all this, is that when mining becomes less profitable and
hashing power falls, the amount of hobbyist mining and decentralization will rise.  How meaningful
will it be?  No one knows, but maybe 100 years in the future, there will be no pools and everyone's
refrigerator will be mining.

@Fencer11, I don't think XT will hurt anything.  It is basically an implementation of Bip101, but
some people don't think its the right way to scale Bitcoin.  Others simply don't trust those that
run XT.  Mike Hearn in particular, has said controversial things in the past.

[hdbuck]

ok my bad, so what do you think of bip000?

As per your mixing view of BIP100 and BIP105, wouldn't you agree that before having such discussion, it would be better to actually witness how the market/miners perform as the network actually grows?
And by that i dont mean spam attacking it to push for some quick fix that hasnt been tested or properly discussed, which should take a while if we take into consideration the very fragile equilibrium that has brought us up until now.

Well I do not partially agree with BIP000. Even though there is currently nothing wrong with Bitcoin, that does not mean that it should not change nor evolve. Basically, with the halving coming in less than a year we can not know what will happen. There is a huge potential for additional growth around it, however if Bitcoin is unable to handle it then we lose out on this opportunity. I would say that we need to work on possible solutions to make enough room for potential growth.
There's nothing wrong with discussing anything before other things happen. Besides, before we actually see some implementation enough time will pass to see how the network is going to handle the remaining months of 2015.

Hum sounds reasonable.

Altho BIP000 is not against any improvement. It is just a call for patience and observation:

I want to revisit once fees become more important than the block reward
So no, I'm not a religious zealot.

Besides, what do you mean by "growth"? because undertaking as much transaction as visa/paypal would required ~26GB/blocks... so how would that be possible without endangering the network's security?

My point being the payment/tipping growth channel is not as realistic as the investment/secured safe haven one, for which fees are meant to be, even with a nice premium, so there would still be room for growth as of now/medium term..

[tvbcof]

Could someone explain to me in non technical terms why Bitcoin XT would hurt the Bitcoin community if it gained the majoority of the vote?

It would cleave the community and the bockchain into two factions and 'sources of truth' respectively.  At least two.  That might be awesome to say the truth, and the best thing which happened to Bitcoin since each group would not be slowing the other down as they pursue their individual goals.  In the case of Core vs. XT/BIP101, it's distributed security vs. a swarming attack on the mainstream monetary alternatives by masses who yearn for Bitcoin (or so they sometimes claim.)

I tend to have an orthogonal way of looking at things so not very many people seem to see the benefits of a fork as I do.

[Peter R]

Many of the small-blockers thinks that because "demand for block space can be considered infinite," that we need a block size limit to keep blocks from becoming arbitrarily large. There's a quote by Revalin that "Bitcoin is the Devil's way of teaching geeks economics."  This is certainly true in this case, because the economists resolved the paradox of "infinite demand" over 100 years ago.  

Indeed, demand can be considered infinite, but only as the price of the commodity tends to zero.  As the price increases, the quantity demanded decreases.  This is known as the Law of Demand.  

In the case of Bitcoin, the cost to produce block space grows exponentially with the size of the block (source) due to the increased chances of orphaning a larger block.  This means that the supply curve always intersects the demand curve at a finite block size.  This is the reason the transaction fee market exists without a block size limit.  

It's basically just another way of saying that there's nothing special about the new economic commodity called "block space."  The Laws of Supply and Demand apply like the do for other commodities.  

...Excuse me if I'm incorrect, but I guess that the main argument for a fee market existing without a blocksize limit is that the block data needed to be transmitted scales linearly with the block size…

The paper proves that a fee market will exist if the information transmitted scales faster than O(log Q) where Q is the size of the block.  I then show using Information Theory that the information transmitted must actually grow as O(Q) which is much faster than the requirement for a healthy fee market. 

...I don't think this is true, as there are technical solutions making block propagation practically O(1)…

It's too bad Gavin used the word O(1) propagation in his blog post, because it's caused all sorts of misunderstanding.  In O(1) time, a miner can transmit a IBLT tailored for particular network conditions.  This will not in general contain enough information to allow the other miners to determine the contents of his block; there is a "set reconciliation" processes that takes place afterwards.  As you might imagine, this process takes time.  The net result is that the total time is NOT O(1).

There is a fundamental law that states that the rate at which information can be transmitted is limited to the carrying capacity of the communication channel.  Transmitting twice the information takes twice as long using an optimal compression scheme. 

Is it safe to say that this comment is based on your own unfinished paper?

I think you mean working paper:

I've read discussion on the mailing list, and there seem to be some significant drawbacks in it.

The claim of the paper, and the math behind that claim, both hold. 

It is normal during the peer-review process for people to challenge a paper's claims and force clarification of the model's assumptions.  This paper was no different.  Through that process, I've been able to strengthen the claims of the paper, remove assumptions, and show that the fee market exists if only (1) there is more than a single miner, and (2) the inflation rate is nonzero. 

[hdbuck]

Could someone explain to me in non technical terms why Bitcoin XT would hurt the Bitcoin community if it gained the majoority of the vote?

It would cleave the community and the bockchain into two factions and 'sources of truth' respectively.  At least two.  That might be awesome to say the truth, and the best thing which happened to Bitcoin since each group would not be slowing the other down as they pursue their individual goals.  In the case of Core vs. XT/BIP101, it's distributed security vs. a swarming attack on the mainstream monetary alternatives by masses who yearn for Bitcoin (or so they sometimes claim.)

I tend to have an orthogonal way of looking at things so not very many people seem to see the benefits of a fork as I do.

guess im orthogonal type too.

too bad they wouldnt dare forking off, in the end..