Do you think "iamnotback" really has the" Bitcoin killer"?

[alkan]

You've got to have the decentralized consensus for the blockchain fixed or nothing else is decentralized which relies on it. And no one has published a solution yet. I claim one though unpublished.

Can you tell us if and how you solved the issue of bribing users/nodes that contribute to the consensus in your model?

Theoretically, I can think of the following solutions to make bribing attacks hard:
a) Make the required bribe amounts very high by increasing the loss risks of the participating users
b) Increase the (absolute) number of users needed for majority control over consensus, so that the only way to bribe them would be to publicly announce the plot.
c) Higher incentives of building the "right" chain by paying increased rewards in case of a higher stale rate or lower overall participation in mining
d) Enforce block forks in case of an attack (e.g. by appying subjective block scoring rules) and let the social consensus select the right fork
e) As the colluding/participating nodes have to refrain from contributing to the right chain (otherwise they cannot build a longer alternative fork), make it so that they cannot actually prove that fact towards to the briber or create a situation where every node could plausible pretend having refrained from contributing to the canonical chain.

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[manselr]

Well shit bitcoin is fucking crashing again. What are you going to do about the current situation? at this rate im not going to be able to buy a good chunk of your alt or any alt if I keep losing purchasing value.

I assume you also depend on your BTC holdings to fund stuff of your own so how are you managing this? We are at 950 and descending, I feel like selling but I feel like im going to sell right at the bottom and then be stuck with USDT. Then again, who is to say we don't keep descending into the abyss? Looks like Jihan is decided to go all in: It's either BUcoin or he dies with it. His ego is too big, same goes for Roger. This will not end well, this is clearly a war and things will be solved by aggressive approaches, both parties aren't going to sit down and end up to any agreements.
Im not sure if I should hold it out throughout the storm, be at USDT, or buy ETH or something else while the situation resolves.

Seeing the price crash this hard made me really pissed off. I thought things were solved after the BU bug since I expected everyone would lose faith on the BU team.
Im going to the gym to box a bit, too much adrenalin contained, FUCK!!!1. I would pay to crush Jihan Wu's little nerd skull. I worked so hard the pass months and my portfolio is going to shit as we speak.

Is your coin prone to such hard fork scenarios? what would happen if a big % of people is convinced to fork your project with different consensus rules and try to steal the name and so on?

if bitcoin dies, beside we becoming poor and not being able to buy any other alts, it wouldnt matter cause all cryptos will die, there will be no trust for any other crypto if bitcoin dies, all alts will lose any network effect too.

so lets hope that bitcoin survives this otherwise we are indeed screwed.

there is an alt bubble, yes tempting to diversify in dash or eth or zec or.. any of the ones that are rising, but very easy to buy at the top of the pump

none of those alts solve the fundamental problems that bitcoin has so why whould i want to get on any other alt but hold btc?

this guys claims to have the be all end all of cryptos solving every posible problem seen in bitcoin and every other alt, i dont believe it. why should I anyway?

[iamnotback]

Well shit bitcoin is fucking crashing again. What are you going to do about the current situation?

I just did something about it as follows.

Remember I had found a high school level math probability error in their InstantX whitepaper.

Can you please point us to your post with review of InstantX?

I am not digging for it. Search this forum for "netcash", then dig through TPTB_need_war's thread.

Actually it is cited in my whitepaper but I am too lazy to go grab it for you.  

Then it just means it's never happened, nor your InstantX analysis nor your secret whitepaper. I searched for netcash, by the way, and found nothing relevant.

Well good thing you ran away, because I just found another high school probability error and this time it is in Bitcoin Unlimited. And you'll find the links to the prior Dash peer review I did in the following quote:

Also I find this explanation very good, also taken from BU's home page under FAQ section:

Will unlimited size blocks actually result in no fee market?

No. Intuitively you can understand this by realizing that it will take a lot longer to propagate a gigantic block across the network than a small one. Therefore a gigantic block has a higher likelihood of being "orphaned" -- that is, a competing block will be found, propagated across the network and supplant the gigantic block. In this case the miner of the gigantic block will lose the block subsidy and transaction fees. Therefore miners are incentivised by limitations in the underlying physical network to produce smaller blocks, and incentivized by transaction fees to produce larger ones.

Finding the balance between these forces is where the free market excels. As underlying physical networks improve or fees increase, miners will naturally be able to produce larger blocks. The transaction "supply" (space in a block) therefore depends directly on the fundamental capacity, rather than relying on some centralized "steering committee" to properly set maximum block size. Bitcoin is all about disintermediation, and this is another example of it working.

Bitcoin Unlimited is a vote for free markets. SegWit is like a communist centrally planned economy.

Although that sounds logical to a n00b, who ever wrote that and believes that must have forgotten or flunked their high school (or perhaps as late as 2nd year university) probability and statistics math class. Reminds me of when I found a high school level probability error in the masternode security model in Dash's InstantX white paper, not to mention how egregiously flawed the Dash the Instant X design is. Evan Duffield replied, but then ran away. Even the economic arguments for Dash's flawed design were refuted. Note that Dash's required premixing (and even not premixing if not employing homomorphic encryption of transaction values, i.e Monero before RingCT) eliminates the possibility of merging UTXO balances and thus causes an exponential blowup in UTXO, which is an issue for scaling to trillions of microtransactions given that performance requires keeping UTXO in RAM.

The probability that another block solution will be found within the propagation time t (not to be confused with at the time t) is the Poisson process (λt)e^-λt where n = 1 (i.e. only one or more occurrences required). Which as λt becomes smaller than roughly ¹/₁₀₀ then e^-λt is closely approximated by 1 - λt or approximately 1. Thus, we can see the probability that another block solution will be found within the propagation time t approximates a linear proportion λt when λt is less than roughly ¹/₁₀₀.

So with a block period (aka block time) λ of 10 minutes and a propagation time t (for finding a second block) of less than 6 seconds (and propagation will usually be less than 600 milliseconds so that is even a more linear relationship at  ¹/₁₀₀₀), then presuming roughly (on average) that doubling the block size doubles both the transaction fees and the propagation time, then the miner has the same income on average with the largest possible block they can make because doubling the risk of another miner finding a block also doubles the miner's income per block statically speaking. If you don't understand this, then read it over and over until you grasp the mathematical (statistical) point that the quoted statement above is incorrect and there is no free market limit on block size and no fee market. The point being that yes the risk of another miner winning the block increases, but the miner's income commensurately (proportionally) also increases, so statistically the miner loses nothing by creating a larger block and thus is leaving tranactions fees on the table for some other miner to take if the miner doesn't make a larger block. However presuming some transactions pay less per byte than others (and higher valued transactions can afford to pay more per byte), the economic converse effect occurs wherein the miner has the incentive to make the smallest block possible or below the size where propagation latency is linearly proportional to block size (i.e. the latency that is a constant factor independent of data transferred), which is again not a free market limit on block size and not a fee market. So the same Tragedy-of-the-Commons occurs that has always been argued as the problem with unlimited block size, in that the power vacuum must be filled by a collusion of miners which pool their (at least 33% of the systemic) hashrate and selfish mine against the rest of the network enforcing a block size which maximizing their profit which is basically the highest level of fees x volume the market will bear. I had even argued (I claim successfully) against @ArticMine that Monero's algorithmically adjusting block size suffers from a similar Tragedy-of-the-Commons outcome (ultimately due to the power-law centralization of mining economies-of-scale). No matter how you slice and dice it, Satoshi's PoW will become centralized so choose your poison how you want to get there, Bitcoin Core (aka Blockstream) funded by banksters or Bitcoin Unlimited (with insufficient developer resources) lead by technical incompetents such as Roger Ver. This is why I designed (a yet unpublished) solution for blockchain consensus which is not PoW and not PoW (something totally new, which I am working on now).

Even if you try to argue that propagation out to the minority hashrate can take up to minutes, the most profitable (i.e. winning) economics models selfish mining wherein only the minimum propagation time to only 33% of the hashrate is relevant, thus it is likely to be (and currently is even to the average network diameter, i.e. the majority) less than 6 seconds.

Bitcoin has taken a big hit because of Bitcoin Unlimited. Roger Ver with his recent affiliation with the technologically flawed Dash (and his Dash pump) and attacking Bitcoin with big blocks is really trying to shake things up, but as I had explained Roger Ver is somewhat technically myopic. Also perhaps some people may be speculating Winkervoss twins might liquidate.


P.S. I liked @gmaxwell's explanation of why cryptocurrency fundamentally must rely on cryptography.


Edit: @aklan made me aware of a Bitcoin Unlimited white paper, which I am reading now and will respond soon.

[alkan]

How do you refute the proofs provided in the paper "A Transaction Fee Market Exists Without a
Block Size Limit"?

We consider three market conditions for Bitcoin transaction fees: healthy, unhealthy and nonexistent.
In a healthy fee market, the miner’s surplus is maximized at a finite quantity of block
space, and thus the miner is incentivized to produce a finite block (Fig. 6a). In an unhealthy
market, the miner’s surplus continually increases with block space, and therefore a rational
miner should produce an arbitrarily large block (Fig. 6b). In a non-existent market, including
any transactions results in a deficit to the miner, and so the miner is better off producing an
empty block (Fig. 6c).

As described in Table 1, an unhealthy fee market requires a propagation time that grows
asymptotically with block size slower than log 𝑄. Using physical arguments, we can show
that this is not possible.

See also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eaMVWUXW8U

[IadixDev]

none of those alts solve the fundamental problems that bitcoin has so why whould i want to get on any other alt but hold btc?

this guys claims to have the be all end all of cryptos solving every posible problem seen in bitcoin and every other alt, i dont believe it. why should I anyway?

There are solution that exists, in the things I posted from e lang, they already offert solution to have trust less decentralized network with crypto and there is no blockchain or pow/pos. They are making à system of decentralized e cash with it.

In theory the solutions exists, but the system with pow/pos is still the simplest, anyone can install and run a node relatively easily and the model of security is simpler in blockchain, but truly trustless decentralized system are already being worked on. And the theory is already there and according to them their code has already been audited and reviewed by independant groups.

[iamnotback]

@alkan, thanks for that. I hadn't bothered to even look at BU, so that is first time I've seen that white paper. I just got back from running an errand so I will read that paper and respond soon.

Peter R. Rizun has another video explanation (I believe he is the very smart @Peter R from our forum?)

Edit: I think I already see the math error in @Peter R's thesis, but wait let me study carefully to the end of the paper. The big hint is his cost of block space goes to 0 when debasement rate (misnomer when called "inflation rate") goes to 0. It is because his math is not properly relativistic (which is surprising given he claims he is a physicist).

[iamnotback]

Peter R. Rizun has another video explanation (I believe he is the very smart @Peter R from our forum?)

Can we expect another video from you soon?  

I'm emaciated from the 60 days (thus far with another 112 days to go but 109 at half dose) of liver toxic, neurotoxic, ocular toxic antibiotics. Maybe later in 2017. I ran at noon 4 consecutive days this week, but only 6 miles total (that's pitiful). I'm not really feeling up for it yet. I am furiously trying to be more focused on production and less focused on marketing or communication right now. I desperately need production right now. I popped my head out of the sand temporarily to look at the developments with Steem/DPoS/Dan and also the RogerVer/Dash/BU/scalepocalypse/pricing predictions because I need to survive on my remaining 9 BTC until I can get a project launched. Worry is good thing, lighting a "be pragmatic" fire under my butt.

Vitalik seems to have a lock on the large head on stick figure persona (and no matter how stickly I am, my cranial disproportions will never compete).

[iamnotback]

Edit: I think I already see the math error in @Peter R's thesis, but wait let me study carefully to the end of the paper. The big hint is his cost of block space goes to 0 when debasement rate (misnomer when called "inflation rate") goes to 0. It is because his math is not properly relativistic (which is surprising given he claims he is a physicist).

I saw that math problem within 1 minute. My followup was delayed because I was having a private chat with someone.

The problem I see with @Peter R's thesis is his equation for the miner's revenue is not relativistic. He talks about that equation at the 6:30min point in a video.

Compare his equation with my math explanation, and you see that Peter's conceptualization employs the average orphan rate for everyone when everyone chooses the same propagation time. The average orphan rate reflects the systemic waste of hashrate due to conflicts over which block to build the next block on. But the key point is that this waste is shared by all miners, so it isn't a cost because the difficulty readjusts commensurately, i.e. the overall profit in the system is determined by the difficulty relative to total block rewards. Peter's conceptual mistake is that it is the relative advantages that miners have over each other that determines relative profitability and this is why the cost of block space doesn't go to 0 when debasement rate goes to 0.

You see PoW is an entirely relative ecosystem and if a 51% attacker wants, he can set the profitability as high as the market will bear, because he can orphan all blocks that aren't his. And even a 33% selfish mining attacker can orphan all blocks that are not his more than 33% of the time (which is why selfish mining is a profitable strategy).

So the problem with Peter's conceptualization is it is the relative profitability between miners that matters. He tried to frame his math in terms of some absolute, which is why he math is broken which should have been obvious to him when the cost of disk space went to 0 with 0 debasement (which it doesn't in a correct model that understands that the cost of block space is only relativistic in terms of relative profitability of miners).

So that is why my math conceptualization is the correct one. And that is why there is a Tragedy-of-the-Commons and no fee market without a block size limit.

I have PM'ed @Peter R. He will remember me, @AnonyMint, as we had debates and discussions on these forums as far back as 2013.

[iamnotback]

A bit more explanation on that math from my prior post:

Here is another way to realize how ridiculous @Peter R's (Bitcoin Unlimited's) thesis is.

Let's assume every miner had the same hashrate and the same propagation delay, i.e. perfect equality, and so the equilibrium block size was established at rate at which the waste costs of orphans for the entire system was balanced with what the market was willing to pay for transaction fees. But every miner would have an incentive to have a higher share of the hashrate and a faster than average propagation delay, because those who did would win a disproportionate share of the rewards (if you don't understand why then you need to study the original selfish mining paper and the followup on optimal mining strategies).

So the natural market outcome is that miners would sign their blocks with a public key representing their reputation to not send invalid blocks. So then miners (pools) would be economically incentivized to trust each other and send only the signed block headers so they can begin mining on the new blocks as fast as possible with only constant factors of propagation (independent of block size). Of course they can still propagate the block data for verification but propagation delay no longer matters. Miners who didn't participate would be less profitable and lose share of hashrate over time. So then you end up with no free market limit on block size, i.e. no fee market. Once again a power vacuum ensues and there must be winner-take-all power-law aggregation of economies-of-scale. This is why Satoshi's PoW is flawed as a decentralization paradigm.

Q.E.D.

It doesn't matter whether you choose SegWit/Core or Bitcoin Unlimited, both are centralized control paradigms. But Bitcoin Unlimited means massive chaos and market confusion (thus probably a cratering price which destroys many miners) until the power structure takes form that takes control over the chaos (which will then be no better than Core because again a monopoly over block size and extracting maximum transaction fees the market will bear). At least with Core, we already have the banksters in control and leading us over the cliff. Continuity is what the miners need right now, until someone invents a real solution. So the miners will reject Bitcoin Unlimited unless they want to shoot themselves in the foot with chaos and cratering price. I think the market will quickly rally behind the most continuous path and reject the copycoin, same as it did for Ethereum Classic. If you don't actually bring a solution for anyone, then don't go fucking up the market and creating needless chaos, because the market will reject it.

...If we fork, BTC tanks, and their profits go down the hole for some time until confidence is restored.

A doubling of coin supply, going from 21 up to 42 would at least solve that Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything from Douglas Adams novel.
Coinfidence would never ever return. Limited supply beeing a foundation of everything.
Forking or 42 are just the wrong answer.

[alkan]

@alkan, thanks for that. I hadn't bothered to even look at BU, so that is first time I've seen that white paper. I just got back from running an errand so I will read that paper and respond soon.

You're welcome.

The point being that yes the risk of another miner winning the block increases, but the miner's income commensurately (proportionally) also increases, so statistically the miner loses nothing by creating a larger block and thus is leaving tranactions fees on the table for some other miner to take if the miner doesn't make a larger block. However presuming some transactions pay less per byte than others (and higher valued transactions can afford to pay more per byte), the economic converse effect occurs wherein the miner has the incentive to make the smallest block possible or below the size where propagation latency is linearly proportional to block size (i.e. the latency that is a constant factor independent of data transferred), which is again not a free market limit on block size and not a fee market.

I'm not sure if I got everything right, so please correct me. Here's my take on the problem (off the top of my head):

- For small-sized blocks (like a few 10kb), connection latency is more important as a limiting factor than bandwidth. So, up to a certain block size, propagation time is sublinear to block size. Or more precisely, propagation time gets asymptotically linear with high block sizes.
- The transactions waiting in the mempool of a miner will usually come with different transaction fees (per byte).
- As a result, building a block with twice as many transactions (ordered by fee per byte, starting from the highest) won't give the miner twice the fees, but considerably less.
- Furthermore, getting more frequent but smaller fee rewards from mining blocks tends to be more profitable as you can reinvest the profits earlier (similar to compound interests). This effect is negligible for big mining farms, but can be important for low-scale miners with only a tiny fraction of the total hash power.
- For all these reasons, miners will have a clear incentive to build blocks as small as possible, or small enough so that bandwidth gets negligible as a limiting factor for propagation time.
- When some of the miners start building small blocks, your own incentive to build small blocks will be enforced due to the higher competition.
- The average block size will at any time converge to a (relatively low) value which gives the miners the highest transaction fees.
- Block size will eventually depend on the network's bandwidth and thus follow Nielsen's Law. However, it will be independent from demand!
- As long as demand exceeds supply, there will be a "healthy" fee market, though this market comes at the price of payment congestion and affects the overall throughput and usability of the network.
- If the demand falls below supply, users could set the fees arbitrarily low as the miners would still include the transactions in their (small) blocks, which results in a Tragedy of the Commons.
- Profitability of mining falls sharply and impairs the network's security due to the decreased hash rate. This also encourages centralization.

EDIT: I completely ommitted that doubling the block size won't double the orphaning risk (as long as the propagation time is significantly smaller than block time). So, my reasoning is not correct.

[alkan]

So with a block period (aka block time) λ of 10 minutes and a propagation time t (for finding a second block) of less than 6 seconds (and propagation will usually be less than 600 milliseconds so that is even a more linear relationship at  ¹/₁₀₀₀), then presuming roughly (on average) that doubling the block size doubles both the transaction fees and the propagation time, then the miner has the same income on average with the largest possible block they can make because doubling the risk of another miner finding a block also doubles the miner's income per block statically speaking.

Doubling the block size (and propagation time) won't double your orphaning risk in most cases. It all depends on the block time. For example, if you increase the current block size from 1 to 2mb, your risk of orphaning would only be slightly higher as propagation time would remain well below the 10 minutes block time.

Neither the total fees nor the orphaning risk are proportional to block size (and propagation time).

[iamnotback]

So with a block period (aka block time) λ of 10 minutes and a propagation time t (for finding a second block) of less than 6 seconds (and propagation will usually be less than 600 milliseconds so that is even a more linear relationship at  ¹/₁₀₀₀), then presuming roughly (on average) that doubling the block size doubles both the transaction fees and the propagation time, then the miner has the same income on average with the largest possible block they can make because doubling the risk of another miner finding a block also doubles the miner's income per block statically speaking.

Doubling the block size (and propagation time) won't double your orphaning risk in most cases. It all depends on the block time. For example, if you increase the current block size from 1 to 2mb, your risk of orphaning would only be slightly higher as propagation time would remain well below the 10 minutes block time.

Neither the total fees nor the orphaning risk are proportional to block size (and propagation time).

You are not paying attention to the math. I wasn't writing about doubling the systemic orphan rate. Please no offense but your last two posts are somewhat incoherent (although I didn't read carefully every single point just a couple and realized I don't have time to unravel it all for you) and sorry if I don't have time to convince you.

[alkan]

You are not paying attention to the math. I wasn't writing about doubling the systemic orphan rate.

I didn't mean the systemic orphan rate but the risk that your block as an individual miner wouldn't make it into the chain.

But you're right that my last two posts aren't coherent. I just realized my error after fact and didn't want to delete the whole post.

[iamnotback]

I want to put my head back in the sand because all this posting is useless. I will just say this is the reason I won't try to create a non-aggregate market, so don't expect any pumps coming from me (and market pricing moves in anything I create will come from agggregate demand):

In order for it to dump, someone must own a lot of Dash. Does anyone own a lot except insiders?

it won't be dumped.  BU will soon be created, DASH will be the first choice to put their money into and the more you have right now the more profit you get. thats what you get when you join dash this time and not a year after. because by then, you'd be buying dash 5x more than what is it today.

More likely is PIVX at $2-5. Most everyone can afford a masternode at 10-20 cents a coin and you don't have to reward a few instaminers.

The Dash pyramid scheme will continue to have an advantage in FOMO over any aggregate freer market, until the base of the pyramid can't grow fast enough to allow the earlier buyers to cash out:

Your debunking of DASH didn't stop the market from appreciating it.

Dash doesn't have a market. It is allegedly a couple of guys working for Evan Inc. running accounts at the major exchanges buying and selling from themselves. It is a greater fool pyramid scheme.

You even stated that no one with large size dared tried to enter that market without a deal with Evan Inc.. So that tells you Roger Ver is in bed with the alleged "fraud" (aka dis-aggregate non-market) or he didn't buy much Dash.

Well it is a well defined analysis, isn't all crypto is structured that way?  People who are the first one to adopt the coins take profit from the next wave who will buy their coins and so on and so forth?  And indeed it is the FOMO that push this Dash buyer to buy more Dash because they probably think Dash will equal 1 BTC or rather even price more than BTC.

The difference is when the float is so extremely concentrated in just a few hands, then they can paint the market prices which ever direction they want them to go. This is known as a non-aggregate market.

Did you see the compounding math advantage on earlier and larger capitalized masternodes? Evan Inc. has probably ~80+% of the money supply by now.

The small float concept works well to draw in the greater fools, and the masternode concept to keep recycling the sold coins back to yourself. It is quite ingenuous. I read Evan worked before in Wallstreet or in investment finance. I guess he learned the tricks they use.

Roger Ver probably got paid off because he brought legitimacy and publicity needed to feed more greater fools into the FOMO spiral.

Hey I am done. I promised @qwizzie a truce. I have no bone in this fight. I don't care because his plan only works against greedy fools (of which the majority will be left holding the empty bag at the end), it isn't a mass market paradigm. As I state before, the caveat is if they could somehow actually spend some of that money to do outstanding R&D but really their technology has sucked up to now and there is no reason to assume any really great devs would be motivated to work for such a pyramid scheme. Great devs don't work just for money, they also want to impact the world in a positive way.


There is a cost to painting the market and constricting the float and milking the greater fools in a pyramid. It means your ecosystem will always be fake and have no real viral growth. All of Dash's ecosystem is some fools regurgitating technological lies, not actually millions of developers changing the world as the Internet is doing as we speak.

[iamnotback]

Here is another way to realize how ridiculous @Peter R's (Bitcoin Unlimited's) thesis is.

Let's assume every miner had the same hashrate and the same propagation delay, i.e. perfect equality, and so the equilibrium block size was established at rate at which the waste costs of orphans for the entire system was balanced with what the market was willing to pay for transaction fees. But every miner would have an incentive to have a higher share of the hashrate and a faster than average propagation delay, because those who did would win a disproportionate share of the rewards (if you don't understand why then you need to study the original selfish mining paper and the followup on optimal mining strategies).

So the natural market outcome is that miners would sign their blocks with a public key representing their reputation to not send invalid blocks. So then miners (pools) would be economically incentivized to trust each other and send only the signed block headers so they can begin mining on the new blocks as fast as possible with only constant factors of propagation (independent of block size). Of course they can still propagate the block data for verification but propagation delay no longer matters. Miners who didn't participate would be less profitable and lose share of hashrate over time. So then you end up with no free market limit on block size, i.e. no fee market. Once again a power vacuum ensues and there must be winner-take-all power-law aggregation of economies-of-scale. This is why Satoshi's PoW is flawed as a decentralization paradigm.

Q.E.D.

It doesn't matter whether you choose SegWit/Core or Bitcoin Unlimited, both are centralized control paradigms. But Bitcoin Unlimited means massive chaos and market confusion (thus probably a cratering price which destroys many miners) until the power structure takes form that takes control over the chaos (which will then be no better than Core because again a monopoly over block size and extracting maximum transaction fees the market will bear). At least with Core, we already have the banksters in control and leading us over the cliff. Continuity is what the miners need right now, until someone invents a real solution. So the miners will reject Bitcoin Unlimited unless they want to shoot themselves in the foot with chaos and cratering price. I think the market will quickly rally behind the most continuous path and reject the copycoin, same as it did for Ethereum Classic. If you don't actually bring a solution for anyone, then don't go fucking up the market and creating needless chaos, because the market will reject it.

I am very very sleepy (8am here haven't slept whole prior day and night), but I wrote this further explanation for someone who didn't understand what I wrote above:

You need to watch Peter R's video which I linked. The orphan rate is what % of the block solutions get thrown away because another block was found and formed a longer chain. I hope you understand orphans. So the % of orphans is the amount of wasted hashrate in the network. The hypothesis is that as we increase the block size to accomodate more transactions, then the orphan rate increases due to higher block propagation time across the network of nodes (and that time t is in the equation for the orphan rate). Thus we say there would be an equilibrium point at which the level of transaction fees the market would bear meets the cost in wasted hashrate. That is Peter R's (and Bitcoin Unlimited's) thesis (in their whitepaper). But I explain that thesis is incorrect, because it assumes that miners all have the same hashrate and propagation delays. Then factor in what I wrote after that, "optimal mining strategies give disproportionate rewards greater than their percentage share to those who have greater share of hashrate and/or faster propagation". Now re-read my explanations with that in mind and perhaps it will make more sense to you?

[dinofelis]

So with a block period (aka block time) λ of 10 minutes and a propagation time t (for finding a second block) of less than 6 seconds (and propagation will usually be less than 600 milliseconds so that is even a more linear relationship at  ¹/₁₀₀₀), then presuming roughly (on average) that doubling the block size doubles both the transaction fees and the propagation time, then the miner has the same income on average with the largest possible block they can make because doubling the risk of another miner finding a block also doubles the miner's income per block statically speaking.

Doubling the block size (and propagation time) won't double your orphaning risk in most cases. It all depends on the block time. For example, if you increase the current block size from 1 to 2mb, your risk of orphaning would only be slightly higher as propagation time would remain well below the 10 minutes block time.

Neither the total fees nor the orphaning risk are proportional to block size (and propagation time).

Well, if everybody is using the default strategy to start mining on the longest chain from the moment of reception, then the systemic orphaning rate IS proportional to the propagation delay, because it is ONLY during this time that a miner might not be aware of a new bloc, finding an old bloc, and propagate it too, making his bloc an orphaned one.

This can be different if people have different strategies, such as selfish mining.

I personally don't believe that the selfish mining strategy makes sense.  It makes sense if you also have influence over network propagation delay, and if there is a race condition between your selfish mined bloc and the public bloc, but if every miner is directly connected with a link with EVERY other miner of significance (which is, I think, a mutually optimal design: full mesh between miners of significance), then the selfish mining strategy can't work: you ONLY know that you have to publish your secret chain when you *received* a good bloc from the others, but at that point, ALL OTHERS received it too, and you will be too late with your chain.

"flooding other nodes" doesn't make sense, because of course, you have parallel equipment to each of your co miners' links and the only thing you do is flooding your own gateway, not impeding other gateways from other miners to your peer.

Selfish mining only makes sense in a node network with variable propagation, but that is not the mutually optimal mining configuration, which is direct links between all pools of significance (say, 10, that makes 90 links).

BTW, of course, within the group of 10, they could collude and decide to keep the bloc chain they've made, secret for half an hour or so.  Which is the principle of selfish mining.   But I don't see the point.   They could just systematically orphan all blocks they receive from the outside network too, much easier.

[dinofelis]

The hypothesis is that as we increase the block size to accomodate more transactions, then the orphan rate increases due to higher block propagation time across the network of nodes (and that time t is in the equation for the orphan rate). Thus we say there would be an equilibrium point at which the level of transaction fees the market would bear meets the cost in wasted hashrate. That is Peter R's (and Bitcoin Unlimited's) thesis (in their whitepaper).

That's kind of ridiculous, indeed.  Fees drop like a stone when you relieve market pressure, much much earlier than when orphaning rate through network propagation becomes a worry for miners.  It can only happen when network propagation times start to be of the order of the bloc times, at which point, the network becomes totally useless, because if you saturate the HIGH SPEED links between miner pools with blocs, no normal user can ever hope to download the bloc chain.

If you get orphaning because propagation delays between miners is of the order of 10 minutes to get ONE BLOC through, you can forget downloading the whole chain on your PC with a lesser link through a P2P network.

Simply ridiculous.  By the time his equilibrium is reached, nobody has a copy of the bloc chain any more except for the miners with their 100 GB/s links between them.  And they won't have any transactions to put in their blocs.

This is not a PoW system any more, but a Proof of network link.

[iamnotback]

Simply ridiculous.  By the time his equilibrium is reached, nobody has a copy of the bloc chain any more except for the miners with their 100 GB/s links between them.  And they won't have any transactions to put in their blocs.

This is not a PoW system any more, but a Proof of network link.

That was an important insight. Thanks. And it is exacerbated by the fact that the network hashrate and propagation is not equally distributed, thus it gets much worse for everyone but the winner-take-all cartel, until the kill-the-network (shoot myself in the foot) "equilibrium" is never reached because with 51% they can set any fee the market will bear. And at 33% they are already selfish mining (possibly disguised as slower propagating large blocks) which means their cartel is gaining more than their proportional share of the rewards (because they waste less hashrate than the rest of the network because they see their block solutions instantly) thus 51% is inevitable as they plow greater profits into faster growing hashrate than the rest of the network (as well the rest of the network is incentivized to join the cartel and accept signed reputation on blocks to get instant propagation time for even large blocks).

Bottom line ultimate result is a winner-take-all monopoly on setting the transaction fees as high as the market will bear. The power vacuum will be filled by cartel, whether it is the bankster controlled Core or a new (Chinese controlled?) cartel run by Ver and Wu, same centralized stench either way. The difference is that we will have loads of chaos while Bitcoin Unlimited goes through that break-their-back phase of the non-cartel miners in order to consolidate 51% control.

At least SegWit can give us Lightning Networks which is good for hype about enabling instant transaction scaling. And Ethereum is about to beat Bitcoin to market with this scaling feature! While Rome burns on a stupid fight over which cartel will control Bitcoin. Bitcoin Unlimited has to keep all transactions on chain which means no instant transactions and as I pointed out before, Roger Ver has technological myopia about the security of 0-confirmation transactions.

Folks Satoshi's PoW is broken and it can't be fixed. You are hereby forewarned that something new will be required. But no one has yet shown what can scale up decentralized. None of the other altcoins shit does either, and I have analyzed it all in very great detail.

[iamnotback]

FYI, I've become a temporary shill for ETH:

Latest info i've read was late march.

Miners don't care about long term if they sell right away. They didn't activate segwit because they could lose short term profits, even though it could take btc to 2k.

http://raiden.network/
https://medium.com/@brainbot/update-from-the-raiden-team-on-development-process-announcement-of-raidex-6c94b4edcf73#.2s8cxvfbe

Some chart analysis seems to indicate ETH is undergoing a pump for the following reasons and could reach $200. I've traded some BTC to ETH because:

1. Appears likely ETH will be first to ship some sort of beta for a Lightning Networks instant transactions clone. Although LN (and also Ethereum's Raiden) requires centralized hubs (for any reasonable usability and scaling) and thus aren't generalized instant txns (i.e. can't do what my OpenShare project will do), they will fool the n00bs and there will be a lot of hype value.

2. Numerous ETH smart contract Dapp ICOs underway, driving demand for ETH (at least until those ICO devs cash out to BTC but they will likely hold during the current ETH rocket shot because of #1).

3. Hedge against the current Bitcoin Unlimited fiasco, which is creating a confidence problem for Bitcoin near-term (might cause Bitcoin to waffle for a while?). I believe others will also want to hedge BTC and the above #1 and #2 adds reasoning to diversify into ETH.


I still don't think Ethereum can scale decentralized (Casper is technological junk), but it doesn't matter because the FOMO fever of greater fools will be intensified by the hype value. And I don't think Ethereum smart contract apps will attain any real world adoption, rather their only utility is as speculator gambling tokens. Nevertheless the FOMO hype contagion is going to very intense. So this appears to be the best altcoin to diversify into. ETH is following DASH's recent to-da-moon chart pattern. It is just time.

This doesn't change the viability of my project at all. My project comes in the next wave (later in 2017 hopefully).

Unlimited block size may not be a technological solution, but I think the end-game would be reasonably far off - at least a year or two.

And chaos in the meantime possibly enabling Ethereum to take the #1 position and run far ahead with the ecosystem network effects. Bitcoin potentially killed once it loses is #1 position.

I've already hedged by trading some BTC to ETH as I wrote today.

Thus I expect the market to kill BTU when the opportunity presents itself. Because the competition from Ethereum by this summer is going to be forcing the Bitcoin camps to strangle each other and have a winner. I am hedging because it appears that many n00bs (even so many proclaimed experts who comment in these threads suck as @franky1) are technologically ignorant enough to believe that unlimited block size is good.

It doesn't mean I like Core's attitude, politics (see my prior fights with @gmaxwell for example), and their bankster funding, but I am just being pragmatic about the fact that there is no fix for Satoshi's PoW, and at least LN provides some hype about moving forward towards instant transaction scaling (although it must be through centralized hubs to actually work and even then it has many flaws).

Personally I'd rather risk choosing the BU team since they can learn and add to the team, whereas core is so sclerotic that it would be game over immediately.

But look how incompetent BU is! They totally mucked up the game theory and math on unlimited blocks. Roger Ver has been spreading incorrect technological argumentation about 0-confirmation security.

So I don't want them in charge. They will surely destroy Bitcoin because they are young, inexperienced, and incompetent. And they don't have the level of technological peer review and IQ that the collective 170+ developers on Core have.

And worst of all, they think they are so righteous yet blind to how their proposals are objectively worse (or they are deviously hiding what their true aims are). Given that Roger Ver is apparently now involved with the fraud model of DASH, it makes me ponder there is more going on than the eye can see.


Here we go:

Time to dump all the coins, too much uncertainty about the future of bitcoin, hostile takeovers, splits, change in PoW, value is going down, time to take profits and wait for some stability.

Although this wall of worry is a buying opportunity, because there must be a winner. But there is the possibility that ETH is the winner. Thus I am now hedging because too many Bitcoiners (especially too many talking heads) follow incompetents such as Ver and Wu.

[dinofelis]

I agree with you concerning ETH.  I don't like it because it is centralized.  I was fond of it because of its smart contract notion, until I understood the ridiculous and unnecessary disaster of Turing Completeness in such things.  But you are 150% right.  ETH has a lot going for it in the greater-fool market.  (but DASH too - I won't touch it with a stick even though I know I could make a fortune with it - I'm not interested in making a fortune for very evil personal reasons ; I'm only interested in living the good life I'm living right now).

That said, I'm losing faith in decentralized systems.  I think after all that Sun Tsu was right: the army that wins is the one that obeys its commander:

The Moral Law causes the people to be in complete accord with their ruler, so that they will follow him regardless of their lives, undismayed by any danger.

I can only think of small scale niche communities with a higher desire for decentralization than for benefit.