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

[RoadTrain]

@RoadTrain: do you believe that the time required for blocks to propagate across (and be verified by) the network does NOT depend on block size?

As a matter of fact, it does depend on block sizes as of now. On the other hand, I believe that will not necessarily be this way in the future. Several proposals can make it possible to transmit blocks in constant-time manner between cooperative counterparties. Moreover, miners are naturally inventivized to use these proposed protocols to limit their orphan rates.

The very possibility of O(1) propagation makes the entire 'natural fee market based on orphan costs' idea flawed in its current form. There are indeed some inherent costs to tx inclusion, but I highly doubt they necessarily should scale linearly with block sizes.

Anyway, even if this O(1) stuff is not really O(1) (it's a buzz I guess, works only in ideal circumstances), when these proposals are implemented, miners will be able to build a lot larger blocks at practically no additional cost. The outcome for non-mining full nodes doesn't look good.

[hdbuck]

Essentially Bitcoin Unlimited is just giving people the freedom of choice, instead of this choice being made by any development team.

This is false. People make their choice once they decide to run Core (that's their choice; they could run other implementations).

I think what he means is that Bitcoin Unlimited has given freedom of choice to the people who didn't want to run Core (or who wanted to make adjustments), but didn't have the aptitude to code and compile their own clients.  Along with XT, it's also created competition, which I think resonates with a lot of people as a sort of "balancing of powers," as it were.  Of course, if people choose to run Core when given other options, then that is their free choice as well.

how many derps the bitcoin unlimiturd has set free so far?

[Zarathustra]

how old are you srlsy?

Such cool. Much slang.  So few vowels.

why are you still hanging around with us old ph0rkers?  

Different kind of users here. On one side, we have kid slang and meme generator posters like hdbuck and many other no names, and on the other side we have a Peter R, who's getting asked to write overviews for CoinDesk.

http://www.coindesk.com/10-must-read-cryptocurrency-research-papers-from-2015/

[sAt0sHiFanClub]

As a matter of fact, it does depend on block sizes as of now.

Not to mention the physical network environment.

On the other hand, I believe that will not necessarily be this way in the future.

Of course, if your future includes a radical change to the way bitcoin works, and by artificially controlling blocksize and RBF, then this is true. But if bitcoin were allowed to grow in a more organic manner, what factors will actually change that will affect block propagation?

Several proposals can make it possible to transmit blocks in constant-time manner between cooperative counterparties. Moreover, miners are naturally inventivized to use these proposed protocols to limit their orphan rates.

By 'several' proposals, I assume you are talking about Matts Relay? Miners are already incentivised to reduce orphan rates -  what makes you think they aren't and need to be?

There are indeed some inherent costs to tx inclusion, but I highly doubt they necessarily should scale linearly with block sizes.

Why? At what point would they become non-linear? Give me a rough scenario where you feel the cost of adding an extra tx would start to become logarithmic.
(assuming you are not talking about miners in a swamp in Florida, USA, on a 56K modem with a 500mb per month limit... )

[johnyj]

Another thing to be considered is the new node setup. Currently it is already a pain to setup a new node, it takes at least several days of delay in downloading and verifying all those transactions, it is especially slow for this year's data, you can imagine that it will be weeks after block size is raised to 2MB

No one knows what will happen if the blockchain continuously grow at 1MB per block, but I think it is already quite a large of stress even in a modern computer, you already need server level hardware to be a node without too much load (16GB memory, 8 core). If the block size is bumped to 2MB, I guess many of the consumer level hardware will not be able to run nodes

Imagine that if in future, each one block takes 1 minute to verify, then it means it will take 271 days to verify 390000 blocks, setting up a new node will take almost one year. Even if each block takes 6 seconds to verify, it is still 27 days for setting up a node

[mayax]

Another thing to be considered is the new node setup. Currently it is already a pain to setup a new node, it takes at least several days of delay in downloading and verifying all those transactions, it is especially slow for this year's data, you can imagine that it will be weeks after block size is raised to 2MB

No one knows what will happen if the blockchain continuously grow at 1MB per block, but I think it is already quite a large of stress even in a modern computer, you already need server level hardware to be a node without too much load (16GB memory, 8 core). If the block size is bumped to 2MB, I guess many of the consumer level hardware will not be able to run nodes

Imagine that if in future, each one block takes 1 minute to verify, then it means it will take 271 days to verify 390000 blocks, setting up a new node will take almost one year. Even if each block takes 6 seconds to verify, it is still 27 days for setting up a node

i don't think there are many persons who are running a node from their home by using a PC or laptop

[johnyj]

Another thing to be considered is the new node setup. Currently it is already a pain to setup a new node, it takes at least several days of delay in downloading and verifying all those transactions, it is especially slow for this year's data, you can imagine that it will be weeks after block size is raised to 2MB

No one knows what will happen if the blockchain continuously grow at 1MB per block, but I think it is already quite a large of stress even in a modern computer, you already need server level hardware to be a node without too much load (16GB memory, 8 core). If the block size is bumped to 2MB, I guess many of the consumer level hardware will not be able to run nodes

Imagine that if in future, each one block takes 1 minute to verify, then it means it will take 271 days to verify 390000 blocks, setting up a new node will take almost one year. Even if each block takes 6 seconds to verify, it is still 27 days for setting up a node

i don't think there are many persons who are running a node from their home by using a PC or laptop

Then it will be centralized to a few large data center thus very easy to be shutdown. So you can understand why some devs even think about in future we should reduce the block size limit. When you have double amount of blocks in another 7 years, the situation will just get worse

[BldSwtTrs]

One of the famous false prophecy of Karl Marx is that the free market mechanism would be lead to the monopoly of few corporations (thanks to economy of scale) that would end up controling the world production.

In other world, he tought unconstrained competition would allow for large entities to capture the economy.

This is already realized in many countries, a few large enterprises controlled the production of almost everything in a country. And the best example is the fiat money creation, totally dominated by a few reserve banks, while from the beginning any kind of private currency is allowed to circulate

It's because of state intervention, not because of competition.

And the block size limit has nothing to do with free market, it is just a measure to prevent spam attacks, without this limit, a bank can jam the traffic on bitcoin network for months, so that no transaction can be done at all

A technical expert (a blockchain advisor making around 20k/month) told me that spam attacks are made easier by a small blocksize.

The fact that small blocksize helps preventing spam attack  is something highly debatable, not a dogma like some Bitcoin developpers want you to believe.

It is very interesting that the longer you work with bitcoin, the more you understand that in such a decentralized system, true free market does not really work, it is in fact very socialized, since everyone's interest is tied to the strongest chain in the end. You can fork what ever chain you like but the value of that chain will be minimal (since it break the most important promise of bitcoin - limited total supply, any fork is inflation, bring in more money supply) thus make that move meaningless market Wise

So you think that the longer you work with Bitcoin the more you understand economics?
It's as misguided as an economists saying the more he studies economics the more he understands Bitcoin.

When you say that free market doesn't work because "such decentralized system is very socialized" you are making a false dichotomy and are showing your lack of understanding of what free market is (and therefore your inability to have a enlightened opinion about wether it is working or not). Market is not antitethical to socialization.
When you are taking about everyone's interest you are taking about market forces (it's interests which drive market behaviors). The fact that everyone's interest are aligned (which is anyway probably untrue) doesn't imply that free market won't work.

[johnyj]

One of the famous false prophecy of Karl Marx is that the free market mechanism would be lead to the monopoly of few corporations (thanks to economy of scale) that would end up controling the world production.

In other world, he tought unconstrained competition would allow for large entities to capture the economy.

This is already realized in many countries, a few large enterprises controlled the production of almost everything in a country. And the best example is the fiat money creation, totally dominated by a few reserve banks, while from the beginning any kind of private currency is allowed to circulate

It's because of state intervention, not because of competition.

And the block size limit has nothing to do with free market, it is just a measure to prevent spam attacks, without this limit, a bank can jam the traffic on bitcoin network for months, so that no transaction can be done at all

A technical expert (a blockchain advisor making around 20k/month) told me that spam attacks are made easier by a small blocksize.

The fact that small blocksize helps preventing spam attack  is something highly debatable, not a dogma like some Bitcoin developpers want you to believe.

It is very interesting that the longer you work with bitcoin, the more you understand that in such a decentralized system, true free market does not really work, it is in fact very socialized, since everyone's interest is tied to the strongest chain in the end. You can fork what ever chain you like but the value of that chain will be minimal (since it break the most important promise of bitcoin - limited total supply, any fork is inflation, bring in more money supply) thus make that move meaningless market Wise

So you think that the longer you work with Bitcoin the more you understand economics?
It's as misguided as an economists saying the more he studies economics the more he understands Bitcoin.

When you say that free market doesn't work because "such decentralized system is very socialized" you are making a false dichotomy and are showing your lack of understanding of what free market is (and therefore your inability to have a enlightened opinion about wether it is working or not). Market is not antitethical to socialization.
When you are taking about everyone's interest you are taking about market forces (it's interests which drive market behaviors). The fact that everyone's interest are aligned (which is anyway probably untrue) doesn't imply that free market won't work.

Then why are you here? You should listen to those master economists that have won Bank's Nobel price of economics: Money supply must be inflative so that it is good for the society 

[RoadTrain]

Several proposals can make it possible to transmit blocks in constant-time manner between cooperative counterparties. Moreover, miners are naturally inventivized to use these proposed protocols to limit their orphan rates.

By 'several' proposals, I assume you are talking about Matts Relay? Miners are already incentivised to reduce orphan rates -  what makes you think they aren't and need to be?

I actually meant something like IBLT and weak blocks. To be honest, my current understanding of them is not as deep as I'd like it to be. From what I know, IBLT allows for a tx list to be 'packed' in a fixed-size structure. It's probabilistic (as bloom filters are) and does have failure rate, so, not really constant-time (but can be under certain circumstances?). But I wonder what natural level of fees will be with them.

Miners can also communicate all the necessary information about a block they're working on in advance. In the fact of such deep cooperation, I guess that miners can be considered a single miner, as in Peter's assumptions.

[Peter R]

@RoadTrain: do you believe that the time required for blocks to propagate across (and be verified by) the network does NOT depend on block size?

As a matter of fact, it does depend on block sizes as of now.

Glad to hear that!  So then all of the assumptions are presently satisfied for the fee market described here to hold, right?


It sounds like your argument then is that the conditions may change such that they no longer hold.  I agree that no one has shown that to be impossible yet.  

On the other hand, I believe that will not necessarily be this way in the future. Several proposals can make it possible to transmit
blocks in constant-time manner between cooperative counterparties. Moreover, miners are naturally inventivized to use these proposed protocols to limit their orphan rates.

The very possibility of O(1) propagation makes the entire 'natural fee market based on orphan costs' idea flawed in its current form...

We've recently been able to show that weak blocks will not affect the existence of a fee market.  This is describe in detail in my recent "subchains" manuscript (Sections 4 and 5).  




In fact, weak blocks improve the fee market by diverting a greater fraction of the fees to pay for proof-of-work instead of paying for orphaned blocks:




I suspect this result will hold for IBLT and any other propagation technique so long as miners can build blocks according to their own volition.  

[BldSwtTrs]

One of the famous false prophecy of Karl Marx is that the free market mechanism would be lead to the monopoly of few corporations (thanks to economy of scale) that would end up controling the world production.

In other world, he tought unconstrained competition would allow for large entities to capture the economy.

This is already realized in many countries, a few large enterprises controlled the production of almost everything in a country. And the best example is the fiat money creation, totally dominated by a few reserve banks, while from the beginning any kind of private currency is allowed to circulate

It's because of state intervention, not because of competition.

And the block size limit has nothing to do with free market, it is just a measure to prevent spam attacks, without this limit, a bank can jam the traffic on bitcoin network for months, so that no transaction can be done at all

A technical expert (a blockchain advisor making around 20k/month) told me that spam attacks are made easier by a small blocksize.

The fact that small blocksize helps preventing spam attack  is something highly debatable, not a dogma like some Bitcoin developpers want you to believe.

It is very interesting that the longer you work with bitcoin, the more you understand that in such a decentralized system, true free market does not really work, it is in fact very socialized, since everyone's interest is tied to the strongest chain in the end. You can fork what ever chain you like but the value of that chain will be minimal (since it break the most important promise of bitcoin - limited total supply, any fork is inflation, bring in more money supply) thus make that move meaningless market Wise

So you think that the longer you work with Bitcoin the more you understand economics?
It's as misguided as an economists saying the more he studies economics the more he understands Bitcoin.

When you say that free market doesn't work because "such decentralized system is very socialized" you are making a false dichotomy and are showing your lack of understanding of what free market is (and therefore your inability to have a enlightened opinion about wether it is working or not). Market is not antitethical to socialization.
When you are taking about everyone's interest you are taking about market forces (it's interests which drive market behaviors). The fact that everyone's interest are aligned (which is anyway probably untrue) doesn't imply that free market won't work.

Then why are you here? You should listen to those master economists that have won Bank's Nobel price of economics: Money supply must be inflative so that it is good for the society 

Economists who think money supply must be inflated are not trusting the free market as do the small blockists regarding the blocksize.

So it's you who shouldn't be here, if you don't trust the free market and love when the settings of the monetary system lie on the decisions of few people you can already use fiat.

[johnyj]

@RoadTrain: do you believe that the time required for blocks to propagate across (and be verified by) the network does NOT depend on block size?

As a matter of fact, it does depend on block sizes as of now.

Glad to hear that!  So then all of the assumptions are presently satisfied for the fee market described here to hold, right?


It sounds like your argument then is that the conditions may change such that they no longer hold.  I agree that no one has shown that to be impossible yet.  

On the other hand, I believe that will not necessarily be this way in the future. Several proposals can make it possible to transmit
blocks in constant-time manner between cooperative counterparties. Moreover, miners are naturally inventivized to use these proposed protocols to limit their orphan rates.

The very possibility of O(1) propagation makes the entire 'natural fee market based on orphan costs' idea flawed in its current form...

We've recently been able to show that weak blocks will not affect the existence of a fee market.  This is describe in detail in my recent "subchains" manuscript (Sections 4 and 5).  




In fact, weak blocks improve the fee market by diverting a greater fraction of the fees to pay for proof-of-work instead of paying for orphaned blocks:




I suspect this result will hold for IBLT and any other propagation technique so long as miners can build blocks according to their own volition.  

I think this picture is incomplete, it lacks some of the other variables: cost of mining rig deployment, cost of operational cost, cost of electricity, and the network speed. When you add those variables in the calculation, the whole picture become more complex

I would like to establish my mining operation in China because of all those costs are much lower there, although their network speed is lower, but I get much higher profit mining every block there. And then if majority of the mining power is in china, then the propagation speed is really decided by the network speed into and out of China, no matter how fast a network a western miner have, you do not benefit from a small block since your block can not reach china thus will be orphaned by their higher hash power. However Chinese miners can use a large block inside their mainland due to faster network there

[Peter R]

I think this picture is incomplete, it lacks some of the other variables: cost of mining rig deployment, cost of operational cost, cost of electricity, and the network speed. When you add those variables in the calculation, the whole picture become more complex

I would like to establish my mining operation in China because of all those costs are much lower there, although their network speed is lower, but I get much higher profit mining every block there. And then if majority of the mining power is in china, then the propagation speed is really decided by the network speed into and out of China, no matter how fast a network a western miner have, you do not benefit from a small block since your block can not reach china thus will be orphaned by their higher hash power. However Chinese miners can use a large block inside their mainland due to faster network there

Yes, it is incomplete.  It is a chart for a particular miner with particular electricity costs and propagation impedance (network connection). Each miner will have his own version of those charts.

[johnyj]

Economists who think money supply must be inflated are not trusting the free market as do the small blockists regarding the blocksize.

So it's you who shouldn't be here, if you don't trust the free market and love when the settings of the monetary system lie on the decisions of few people you can already use fiat.

You can trust the free market and fork to whatever chain you like, but then it is exactly the inflation that you are against, do you see the contradiction here?

In fact, the day you fork your coin and set up your exchange, you will face millions of pre-fork coins dumped on your exchanges, then your coin on that fork will worth basically nothing. This is the result of free market forking, and exactly because of this result, you are not free to fork as you wish, that's why I say that your freedom here are heavily limited by your economic incentive

[Peter R]

Economists who think money supply must be inflated are not trusting the free market as do the small blockists regarding the blocksize.

So it's you who shouldn't be here, if you don't trust the free market and love when the settings of the monetary system lie on the decisions of few people you can already use fiat.

You can trust the free market and fork to whatever chain you like, but then it is exactly the inflation that you are against, do you see the contradiction here?

In fact, the day you fork your coin and set up your exchange, you will face millions of pre-fork coins dumped on your exchanges, then your coin on that fork will worth basically nothing. This is the result of free market forking, and exactly because of this result, you are not free to fork as you wish, that's why I say that your freedom here are heavily limited by your economic incentive

Right, so it is very unlikely that two chains will co-exist.  Instead, the free-market will crown a winner.  I don't think BldSwtTrs disagrees. 

[BldSwtTrs]

Economists who think money supply must be inflated are not trusting the free market as do the small blockists regarding the blocksize.

So it's you who shouldn't be here, if you don't trust the free market and love when the settings of the monetary system lie on the decisions of few people you can already use fiat.

You can trust the free market and fork to whatever chain you like, but then it is exactly the inflation that you are against, do you see the contradiction here?

In fact, the day you fork your coin and set up your exchange, you will face millions of pre-fork coins dumped on your exchanges, then your coin on that fork will worth basically nothing. This is the result of free market forking, and exactly because of this result, you are not free to fork as you wish, that's why I say that your freedom here are heavily limited by your economic incentive

Forks produce quickly a Bitcoin chain and an alternative chain. Relative to the pre-fork world, the end result of a fork is just one more altcoin.

You don't need to worry about the inflationary nature of forks more than you are worried about the inflationary nature of altcoins.

[VeritasSapere]

Economists who think money supply must be inflated are not trusting the free market as do the small blockists regarding the blocksize.

So it's you who shouldn't be here, if you don't trust the free market and love when the settings of the monetary system lie on the decisions of few people you can already use fiat.

You can trust the free market and fork to whatever chain you like, but then it is exactly the inflation that you are against, do you see the contradiction here?

In fact, the day you fork your coin and set up your exchange, you will face millions of pre-fork coins dumped on your exchanges, then your coin on that fork will worth basically nothing. This is the result of free market forking, and exactly because of this result, you are not free to fork as you wish, that's why I say that your freedom here are heavily limited by your economic incentive

I think that it is unlikely that Bitcoin would split because of this, however I do think that we should also accept this as a possibility and a feature of the the freedom of choice. This is what solves the problem of tyranny of the majority and guarantees our right to self determination. I think that you are wrong in seeing this as a form of inflation however, in the same sense that the existence of the Zimbabwe dollar does not make the US dollar more inflationary, or another example might be the existence of alternative cryptocurrencies, altcoins do not make Bitcoin more inflationary.

I also think that you are wrong in thinking that we are not free to fork because of economic incentive, quite the opposite actually, it is this economic incentive which will actually incentivize a fork, since increasing the throughput of the Bitcoin blockchain increases its utility and therefore also its value.

[RoadTrain]

We've recently been able to show that weak blocks will not affect the existence of a fee market.  This is describe in detail in my recent "subchains" manuscript (Sections 4 and 5).

That is indeed an interesting paper and looks correct at the first glance. I must note that IBLT looks quite different, so it likely requires another paper

[hdbuck]

Another thing to be considered is the new node setup. Currently it is already a pain to setup a new node, it takes at least several days of delay in downloading and verifying all those transactions, it is especially slow for this year's data, you can imagine that it will be weeks after block size is raised to 2MB

No one knows what will happen if the blockchain continuously grow at 1MB per block, but I think it is already quite a large of stress even in a modern computer, you already need server level hardware to be a node without too much load (16GB memory, 8 core). If the block size is bumped to 2MB, I guess many of the consumer level hardware will not be able to run nodes

Imagine that if in future, each one block takes 1 minute to verify, then it means it will take 271 days to verify 390000 blocks, setting up a new node will take almost one year. Even if each block takes 6 seconds to verify, it is still 27 days for setting up a node

i don't think there are many persons who are running a node from their home by using a PC or laptop

Then it will be centralized to a few large data center thus very easy to be shutdown. So you can understand why some devs even think about in future we should reduce the block size limit. When you have double amount of blocks in another 7 years, the situation will just get worse

yup, blocksize aint about to change as far as the drama goes.

forkers need to fork off once and for all.

the fuckwits are getting redundant with their sens0r ships and unlimiturd whatnot.


edit: and now roger ver is making out with more scammers: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1303147.0;topicseen

derps gotta derp.