Analysis and list of top big blocks shills (XT #REKT ignorers)

[Lauda]

I absolutely second that. What fundamental flaws?

Apparently he meant this article:

try this

I'm too tired to analyze all parts of the article. Let me just point 1 thing out:

What I’m not for, however, is prematurely deprecating critical parts of bitcoin (zeroconf transactions and low transaction fees)

The author works under the premise that these transaction are fundamental parts of Bitcoin. The right description would be: "these are dangerous, and you shouldn't use them, because you will lose money, and people who know better will laugh at you".
I will get back to this, but even if these points are true they sure aren't 'fundamental flaws'.

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[sAt0sHiFanClub]

I absolutely second that. What fundamental flaws?

Apparently he meant this article:

try this

I'm too tired to analyze all parts of the article. Let me just point 1 thing out:

What I’m not for, however, is prematurely deprecating critical parts of bitcoin (zeroconf transactions and low transaction fees)

The author works under the premise that these transaction are fundamental parts of Bitcoin. The right description would be: "these are dangerous, and you shouldn't use them, because you will lose money, and people who know better will laugh at you".
I will get back to this, but even if these points are true they sure aren't 'fundamental flaws'.

His views on 0-conf and fees are orthogonal to a discussion on LN.

Address the issues around:

• How it will avoid centralization when the only likely working model will be hub and spoke.?
• Why transact on main chain at all if payment channels can be settled (effectively) channel to channel?
• How are routes going to be found in real time unless they are for common/recurrent payments?
• How are routes going to persist? Or should they? 
• How long will funds need to be tied up on main chain to support single/multiple channels?

 

[sgbett]

I absolutely second that. What fundamental flaws?

Apparently he meant this article:

try this

I'm too tired to analyze all parts of the article. Let me just point 1 thing out:

What I’m not for, however, is prematurely deprecating critical parts of bitcoin (zeroconf transactions and low transaction fees)

The author works under the premise that these transaction are fundamental parts of Bitcoin. The right description would be: "these are dangerous, and you shouldn't use them, because you will lose money, and people who know better will laugh at you".
I will get back to this, but even if these points are true they sure aren't 'fundamental flaws'.

His views on 0-conf and fees are orthogonal to a discussion on LN.

Address the issues around:

• How it will avoid centralization when the only likely working model will be hub and spoke.?
• Why transact on main chain at all if payment channels can be settled (effectively) channel to channel?
• How are routes going to be found in real time unless they are for common/recurrent payments?
• How are routes going to persist? Or should they?  
• How long will funds need to be tied up on main chain to support single/multiple channels?

 

I don't see they are fundamental flaws. They all end with a question mark for one thing which implies uncertainty.

This is my understanding about some of those questions.

LN is open source and there are financial motives to run a node. Bigger nodes might be better connected (=more profitable). There will be a degree of centralisation (like mining) I don't see LN being billed as a fix to centralisation?

You transact (multiple times) off chain, net balances are settled on chain.

Routing is explained in the paper and analogous to network routing, if routes don't exist then I expect missing hops will be set up on the fly.

I *think* channels can be torn down instantly at which point funds are settled.

I think a bigger concern is transacting off chain appears to be opaque until a transaction occurs on chain that nets out the respective balances. That is to say only the nodes that constitute a payment channel know about the transaction. Whereas with on chain then that transaction is immediately publicised and propagated to all nodes in public.

The other thing I'm thinking about is that although individual LN transactions are trustless when conducted directly between Alice and Bob, as soon as Carl, Dave and Eddie get involved things change. Whilst the middle men here are financially motivated to do the right thing (and they can't steal -  so perhaps trust is not the right word), you have to *rely* on these third parties, instead of a homogenous network of HA nodes.

LN is definitely not inherently bad, provided people realise its a payment channel for bitcoin and not bitcoin itself. (Much like bank transfers vs cash). Which seems right to me...

I'd use certainly use LN for buying coffee.

[AlexGR]

Again, there is no "paradox" here.
-snip-

Your argument is a waste of time (no offense). This is not helpful at all.

All I'm saying is that bitcoin can be viewed as different things, depending the time you live in.

If you live in 1995, it could be "impossible"
If you live in 2015, it could be "problematic to scale"
If you live in 2035, it could be "fantastic"

...and the basic algorithm could be practically the same, the only thing that will have changed is the way the hardware and networks have gone upwards in capabilities by 1000x to 10000x.

So the problems are not necessarily "inherent" to bitcoin, but rather a result of a software-hardware-network ...equation.

Obviously, by improving the software right now we can do more with scaling. For example I was reading about ASICs doing the validation. Well, why ASICs and not GPUs for start? This should be relatively easy to port, with opencl and stuff - so it would allow cpu+gpu to be exploited for max performance. The processing part could take a boost there for sure because GPUs are much much faster.

As for storage, that's where we'll need a breakthrough I suspect. Compression will probably be one that gives serious gains (a simple gzip on a ~130mb block.dat takes me down to something like 100mb), but since CPUs are slow with the compression/decompression of large data sets, maybe it too should be given as a task to GPUs in multiple "blocks" of compressed data to exploit GPU parallelism. If a computer can handle compressed data with virtually no lag, then perhaps there can be a positive spillover effect to the network itself by the transmission of compressed data packages which are compressed/decompressed in realtime by the GPUs for near-zero lag. I think harnessing GPU power is definitely something worth exploring for future scaling, in more than one ways.

[notbatman]

GPUs? This is a troll post right? 

[Lauda]

His views on 0-conf and fees are orthogonal to a discussion on LN.

Then the author would have not mentioned it in a post about LN. Something is off.

• How it will avoid centralization when the only likely working model will be hub and spoke.?
• Why transact on main chain at all if payment channels can be settled (effectively) channel to channel?
• How are routes going to be found in real time unless they are for common/recurrent payments?
• How are routes going to persist? Or should they?  
• How long will funds need to be tied up on main chain to support single/multiple channels?

I don't see they are fundamental flaws. They all end with a question mark for one thing which implies uncertainty.
LN is open source and there are financial motives to run a node.

Exactly. While there are some engineering challenges to be solved nobody informed is seriously concerned with path finding. Also people could develop their own version of LN with everything listed there being "fixed". That's where the problem lies. Most people in this community have no skills or skills that are mostly useless and thus we just see them make hyperbolic complaints (out of boredom maybe?).

All I'm saying is that bitcoin can be viewed as different things, depending the time you live in.

I understand that and this discussion is useless to me, so there's no need to continue.

[sAt0sHiFanClub]

Exactly. While there are some engineering challenges to be solved nobody informed is seriously concerned with path finding. Also people could develop their own version of LN with everything listed there being "fixed". That's where the problem lies.

You bet - they dont seem concerned one bit with promoting an incomplete concept as a defined solution. Many of the changes being forced into Bitcoin *today* are supposed to be required to enable LN - but as you have stated above we are nowhere near knowing exactly how it is going to do what it does.

In telecoms we call what LN is trying to do "correlation" - i.e taking high frequency, low value traffic and generating lower volume, high value data streams instead.  The methods proposed by Blockstream so far, while not impossible, are far from optimal and will prove an absolute bugger to deploy.

But why all the "we must do X now so that LN will work"?

Most people in this community have no skills or skills that are mostly useless and thus we just see them make hyperbolic complaints (out of boredom maybe?).

I'd contend that your comment is more a reflection of your own ignorance than the alleged ignorance of anyone taking the time to look into it and voice a concern.

[Lauda]

In telecoms we call what LN is trying to do "correlation" - i.e taking high frequency, low value traffic and generating lower volume, high value data streams instead.  The methods proposed by Blockstream so far, while not impossible, are far from optimal and will prove an absolute bugger to deploy.

But why all the "we must do X now so that LN will work"?

This must be a joke? Segwit is also needed for LN and it brings many needed fixes along with it. This is just an example. I don't see any proposal that is solely for LN and that has no other uses?

I'd contend that your comment is more a reflection of your own ignorance than the alleged ignorance of anyone taking the time to look into it and voice a concern.

So your answer is ad hominem? Most people here have minimum IT knowledge and their concerns are often a waste of time and a result of listening to propaganda. You know it, I know it, everyone knows it. You would just never admit it.

[Fatman3001]

So your answer is ad hominem?

It's perfectly reasonable to reply with an ad hominem when you talk down to the community like that. You threw logic out of the window when you went down that path.

[bargainbin]

So your answer is ad hominem?

It's perfectly reasonable to reply with an ad hominem when you talk down to the community like that. You threw logic out of the window when you went down that path.

Bro, how can he not talk down to this ignorant community when the yokels refuse to deffer to his [albeit only self-proclaimed] expertise?
Do you even Gaem Theorie?

[Lauda]

It's perfectly reasonable to reply with an ad hominem when you talk down to the community like that. You threw logic out of the window when you went down that path.

So you're saying that the majority of the community has good IT knowledge? I said nothing wrong, it is well known that the majority of the people in general have very limited knowledge. The problem here is that people are living in denial. Once you call them out on it, they attack you. Just the toxicity of the ecosystem (which was definitely not present until these takeover attempts appeared and Blockstream suddenly became "evil").

[thejaytiesto]

I haven't read yet about the connection of Blockstream and PwC. Are PwC financing Blockstream? If so then what's the problem? As long as the code is open source and they don't do stupid shit (like clearly becoming anti privacy like Bitcoin XT and so on) who cares the money comes from as long as it's used for the betterment of Bitcoin. I wish Jamie Dimon used his billions to fund Bitcoin development instead of being a dick.

[Lauda]

I haven't read yet about the connection of Blockstream and PwC. Are PwC financing Blockstream? If so then what's the problem?

You can read about it here. There's no problem with it; the only people who have a problem with this are either shills, or they are trying to spread propaganda for whatever reason, or biased (fighting against them?). Why should once care about this any more than for some other random partnership with a Bitcoin startup?

As long as the code is open source and they don't do stupid shit (like clearly becoming anti privacy like Bitcoin XT and so on) who cares the money comes from as long as it's used for the betterment of Bitcoin. I wish Jamie Dimon used his billions to fund Bitcoin development instead of being a dick.

Exactly. You don't have to trust Blockstream or trust anyone for that matter. As long as you can verify the code behind Bitcoin you are good to go.

[sAt0sHiFanClub]

It's perfectly reasonable to reply with an ad hominem when you talk down to the community like that. You threw logic out of the window when you went down that path.

So you're saying that the majority of the community has good IT knowledge? I said nothing wrong, it is well known that the majority of the people in general have very limited knowledge. The problem here is that people are living in denial. Once you call them out on it, they attack you. Just the toxicity of the ecosystem (which was definitely not present until these takeover attempts appeared and Blockstream suddenly became "evil").

The issue is you having the temerity to believe yourself qualified to comment on their level of knowledge.  You are attempting to defend a technical issue, but you come across as not having a clue.

Your "You dont understand it, let the 'informed' ones take care of it because technical" is annoying.

[sAt0sHiFanClub]

So your answer is ad hominem?

It's perfectly reasonable to reply with an ad hominem when you talk down to the community like that. You threw logic out of the window when you went down that path.

Bro, how can he not talk down to this ignorant community when the yokels refuse to deffer to his [albeit only self-proclaimed] expertise?
Do you even Gaem Theorie?

Laudas 2 favorite core developers ( in no particular order)

1. Pieter Wuille
2. Sipa

(Yes, Lauda, I have seen your contributions on IRC)

[Lauda]

The issue is you having the temerity to believe yourself qualified to comment on their level of knowledge.  You are attempting to defend a technical issue, but you come across as not having a clue.

There is no issue and of course I'm qualified enough. You can take two different approaches here: 1) Look at studies that provide numbers of the general knowledge; 2) Asses the situation yourself. I don't have to defend anything and am definitely more informed than people of your caliber.

1. Pieter Wuille
2. Sipa

(Yes, Lauda, I have seen your contributions on IRC)

You've started trolling (i.e. breaking the rules). I have only had interactions with this developer a few times where he answered a few questions (which were often not directed at him). I barely use IRC on those channels (thus also trolling).

[sAt0sHiFanClub]

I haven't read yet about the connection of Blockstream and PwC. Are PwC financing Blockstream? If so then what's the problem?

You can read about it here. There's no problem with it; the only people who have a problem with this are either shills, or they are trying to spread propaganda for whatever reason, or biased (fighting against them?). Why should once care about this any more than for some other random partnership with a Bitcoin startup?

You didnt even address his issue - "Are PwC financing Blockstream?"  
Allow me:
No, PwC dont 'finance' people. They are a consulting firm who will partner with service providers and deliver these services to their clients ( or just recommend them)

However, PwC will often match up companies in need of finance with those willing to offer it.  Is it a bad thing for bitcoin? Hard to tell. PwC tend to act on behalf of - and for the benefit of - the very industries bitcoin was hoping to compete with ( or at least provide an alternative)

[CuntChocula]

So your answer is ad hominem?

It's perfectly reasonable to reply with an ad hominem when you talk down to the community like that. You threw logic out of the window when you went down that path.

Bro, how can he not talk down to this ignorant community when the yokels refuse to deffer to his [albeit only self-proclaimed] expertise?
Do you even Gaem Theorie?

Laudas 2 favorite core developers ( in no particular order)

1. Pieter Wuille
2. Sipa

(Yes, Lauda, I have seen your contributions on IRC)

You're dealing with a guy who claims that theymos' unfinished 2+ million dollar forum software is better than SMF software in every respect. Not kidding.
Your logics have no power here.

... I don't have to defend anything and am definitely more informed than people of your caliber. ...

[BlindMayorBitcorn]

I haven't read yet about the connection of Blockstream and PwC. Are PwC financing Blockstream? If so then what's the problem?

You can read about it here. There's no problem with it; the only people who have a problem with this are either shills, or they are trying to spread propaganda for whatever reason, or biased (fighting against them?). Why should once care about this any more than for some other random partnership with a Bitcoin startup?

You didnt even address his issue - "Are PwC financing Blockstream?"  
Allow me:
No, PwC dont 'finance' people. They are a consulting firm who will partner with service providers and deliver these services to their clients ( or just recommend them)

However, PwC will often match up companies in need of finance with those willing to offer it.  Is it a bad thing for bitcoin? Hard to tell. PwC tend to act on behalf of - and for the benefit of - the very industries bitcoin was hoping to compete with ( or at least provide an alternative)

Ironing.gif

[sAt0sHiFanClub]

The issue is you having the temerity to believe yourself qualified to comment on their level of knowledge.  You are attempting to defend a technical issue, but you come across as not having a clue.

There is no issue and of course I'm qualified enough. You can take two different approaches here: 1) Look at studies that provide numbers of the general knowledge; 2) Asses the situation yourself. I don't have to defend anything and am definitely more informed than people of your caliber.

1. Pieter Wuille
2. Sipa

(Yes, Lauda, I have seen your contributions on IRC)

You've started trolling (i.e. breaking the rules). I have only had interactions with this developer a few times where he answered a few questions (which were often not directed at him). I barely use IRC on those channels (thus also trolling).

You accused me of an ad-hom when calling you out for labeling anyone who questions core as an uninformed fool. Yet you still failed to adress any technical issues raised. I'd class responding to a post with less than usefull content as a form of trolling. Its a matter pf perspective.

I [..] am definitely more informed than people of your caliber

I think this statement summarizes your attitude perfectly.