Do miners really think destroying Bitcoin will make them rich?

[Yakamoto]

It is accurate to call what the miners do is to destroy the bitcoin. They are too greedy, so they come up with the idea of BU, because of that greed they are making the bitcoin die off. At present, the value of bitcoin is severely depreciated. While alt coins are growing and going up to an incredible level, most altcoins go up, but the bitcoin goes against it, it is dying, and the killer Dead bitcoin is the main miners. They are bad guys who just satisfy their greed and do not think about anyone.

It is true that BU will give more power to the miners but i am not certain that they want to destroy bitcoin,they just want more control over the entire process ,who would not like to like their fingers when they put their hands in honey pot,all the major miners has invested a huge amount of money and they want to have a sustainable profit on par with their investment and may be so is the reason they are siding with them.

BU is garbage m8, not sure if you can even justify using it in a serious way and not also want to literally bend over for an extremely centralized system compared to what we have going on right now.

Reminder that there is no way that centralizing power and giving control to miners is a solution.

Also, welcome to the free market.

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[aarons6]

maybe instead of making the blocks bigger, or adding an extra network. they can cut the block time and reward in half.. making available twice the transactions in the same time frame.. but keeping the same number of generated coins.. they would then need to move the next halving to 8 years instead of 4..

problem solved?

[jonald_fyookball]

maybe instead of making the blocks bigger, or adding an extra network. they can cut the block time and reward in half.. making available twice the transactions in the same time frame.. but keeping the same number of generated coins.. they would then need to move the next halving to 8 years instead of 4..

problem solved?

Far too radical.

Even if viable, core has expressed complete unwillingness to compromise or scale in any way, shape, or form, other than Gregory Maxwell's roadmap, which is at the heart of the dillema.

[andyatcrux]

maybe instead of making the blocks bigger, or adding an extra network. they can cut the block time and reward in half.. making available twice the transactions in the same time frame.. but keeping the same number of generated coins.. they would then need to move the next halving to 8 years instead of 4..

problem solved?

Far too radical.

Even if viable, core has expressed complete unwillingness to compromise or scale in any way, shape, or form, other than Gregory Maxwell's roadmap, which is at the heart of the dillema.

You are one of the most level headed people here, so no disrespect, but are you getting all your information from r/BTC ? This statement of yours is not exactly true. Contributors to Core have varying degrees of opinion but have more or less agreed to converge on a compromise, including increase in block size. If you could give more examples, I may be missing part of the picture.

[deisik]

maybe instead of making the blocks bigger, or adding an extra network. they can cut the block time and reward in half.. making available twice the transactions in the same time frame.. but keeping the same number of generated coins.. they would then need to move the next halving to 8 years instead of 4..

problem solved?

Won't work out for pretty obvious reasons

People (miners and developers alike) cannot agree even on just direct block size change (by setting one constant/variable in the Bitcoin code) that would do basically the same stuff. The changes you suggest don't fix the problem (just like simple block size increase), they would only alleviate and postpone it somewhat. Even SegWit itself should be considered as an interim solution only since instant transactions are the thing of the future and we are getting there fast (that's what Dash seems to be already doing)

[dinofelis]

(that's what Dash seems to be already doing)

Uh, no !  DASH only confirms that your transaction is in the mem pool.  It also "confirms" that the mem pool won't allow another transaction double spend ; but that is fundamentally flawed because it would violate the CAP theorem. In other words, some master nodes may honestly confirm your transaction, while some OTHER masternodes may confirm your OTHER transaction during network delays, leading to an inconsistency in confirmed transactions.  The only way to avoid that, would be to require 100% masternode confirmation, at which point, THEY are the solvers of the consensus, and you don't need a block chain any more !  But it would be sufficient to have one badly behaving masternode and you would bring all of DASH to a stand still.  So this doesn't work.  Instant Pay only works at very low traffic rates.  It is a snake oil scheme of confirmation.
It still has to go on the block chain before really being confirmed, that block could just as well be orphaned, and gone is your transaction !

[deisik]

(that's what Dash seems to be already doing)

Uh, no !  DASH only confirms that your transaction is in the mem pool.  It also "confirms" that the mem pool won't allow another transaction double spend ; but that is fundamentally flawed because it would violate the CAP theorem. In other words, some master nodes may honestly confirm your transaction, while some OTHER masternodes may confirm your OTHER transaction during network delays, leading to an inconsistency in confirmed transactions.  The only way to avoid that, would be to require 100% masternode confirmation, at which point, THEY are the solvers of the consensus, and you don't need a block chain any more !  But it would be sufficient to have one badly behaving masternode and you would bring all of DASH to a stand still.  So this doesn't work.  Instant Pay only works at very low traffic rates.  It is a snake oil scheme of confirmation.
It still has to go on the block chain before really being confirmed, that block could just as well be orphaned, and gone is your transaction!

I don't really know since I'm not very interested in altcoins nowadays

I just read it in the trollbox of one exchange that Dash makes instant transactions possible and thought that the future has already arrived. Therefore, Bitcoin might really have started to become obsolete with its 10 minute confirmation times as well as seriously lagging behind some advanced altcoins that have emerged recently. If what you say is true, Bitcoin might in fact have some leeway, at least, so far. Nevertheless, the time is running out for it and it is running out fast at that

[AngryDwarf]

If Dash's instant transactions work as dinofelis says they do, then they are not worth the digits they are stored in. Masternodes are really nothing more than a taxation method on miners earnings for providing services of dubious quality.

In BTC, zero confirmation economic risk as been replaced from the disadvantageous double spend propagation attempt to one where the transaction does not confirm at all due to the exceeding of block capacity, transaction pool forgetfulness and selective node transaction relay.

There are methods that could be considered to reduce zero confirmation economic risk for on-chain transactions, but I suppose there is little interest in solving it when it is full steam ahead on a lightning network future.

[Carlton Banks]

"Miners are semi-trusted & serve at will of users. Users have full rights of self-defense when preponderance of miners behaving insecurely."  - Nick Szabo

(a few hours ago)

PoW change, ladies & gentlemen. It's time. (it's overdue in fact)


Eat, or be eaten

[dinofelis]

If Dash's instant transactions work as dinofelis says they do, then they are not worth the digits they are stored in. Masternodes are really nothing more than a taxation method on miners earnings for providing services of dubious quality.

Well, from the paper that describes this way of working:

https://www.dash.org/instantx/

Locking messages will propagate across the whole Darkcoin network and reach all clients. Once the lock has reached everyone, a set of deterministically selected masternodes will form a consensus. Next, upon a successful consensus, a message will be broadcasted across the network and at this point all clients will respect the lock on the funds

--> the part in bold is a clear impossibility in a P2P network and is essentially the fundamental problem of consensus making.

and

By utilizing the masternode network, we can gain a degree of certainty that the transaction in question is valid and will be accepted into the blockchain after that. Immediately after the propagation of a lock, the selected masternodes will begin to vote on the validity of the transaction lock. If consensus is reached on a lock by the Masternode network, all conflicting transactions would be rejected thereafter, unless they matched the exact transaction ID of the lock in place. Clients would be tasked with clearing out conflicting locks and possibly reversing attacker transactions. This would only happen in a case where an attacker submitted multiple locks to the network at once and the network formed consensus on one but not the other. If no consensus is reached, standard confirmation will be required to assure that a transaction is valid.
3.2 Election Algorithm and Voting
 A special deterministic algorithm is used to determine a pseudo-random ordering of the masternodes. By using the hash from the proof-of-work for each block, security of this functionality will be provided by the mining network. Pseudo Code, for selecting a masternode:

Essentially, this mechanism proposes that once consensus is reached, it can reach consensus
If it were possible to ensure that "all nodes received the message", there would never ever be any consensus problem.  In other words, instant pay works well, if there is no double spend attempt.

After that, the miners still include what they want, if I understand well.  However, most probably they are asked to include instant-pay confirmed transactions first.

It is important to realize the circular argument in this, because it can sound credible.   The whole, and the SINGLE difficulty in setting up a crypto coin, and the exact reason why Satoshi invented Proof of Work and the Block chain, is that it is essentially impossible to:

1) make sure that EVERYONE on the network got the transaction

2) that the order in which two contradictory transactions are received on the network is the same for everyone

If one could make this happen, crypto would be MUCH MUCH simpler.  There wouldn't be any mining, blocks or whatever.  Indeed, every node on the network would receive ALL transactions in order, and only accept the first one if there's a double spend attempt.  There wouldn't be any need to put these transactions in blocks, to mine them, to "secure" them with PoW or anything of the kind.  That whole circus only serves ONE SINGLE PURPOSE: deciding, once and for all, in what order the propagated transactions should be processed, and picking (at random) one of the conflicting ones.

If you can SOLVE this problem in one way or another (like DASH pretends, with its propagating "locks"), then there's no need for blockchains, mining or any other securing.  Propagating the lock, or propagating the transaction, is the same.  The first one should be locking out the second one, and it is exactly because this cannot be rigorously imposed, that all the hassle with block chains has been invented.  So if you can propagate the LOCKS correctly, you could have propagated the transactions correctly.  And no more mining, blocks and whatever.

So instant pay solves the problem, when the problem didn't need to be solved.

[megynacuna]

No one will give energy to something cannot obtain interests, even if the future that is right, but now impossible.

Why is it impossible now? Is it because of the seemingly gradual drop in Bitcoin prices?

[Kevin77]

This is way off point but just to pick nits; Since there is only one fixed size block header then the ratio of transactions to block size does scale even in your definition although granted it is a tiny amount and not worthy of this mighty discussion.

I think we misunderstand each other because we are using a different definitions of scaling.

Recognizing this will help future discussions.

I really think that miners are just testing our patience here, they keep increasing the fees just to see to what point they can get a good amount of it without hurting the prices or the overall exchange market of the bitcoin, they are not afraid of making things worst because they know they can just hold the bitcoin for a while and that will make things go back to normal, there goes to show you how they have a strong control over the bitcoin.

[jonald_fyookball]

If Dash's instant transactions work as dinofelis says they do, then they are not worth the digits they are stored in. Masternodes are really nothing more than a taxation method on miners earnings for providing services of dubious quality.

In BTC, zero confirmation economic risk as been replaced from the disadvantageous double spend propagation attempt to one where the transaction does not confirm at all due to the exceeding of block capacity, transaction pool forgetfulness and selective node transaction relay.

There are methods that could be considered to reduce zero confirmation economic risk for on-chain transactions, but I suppose there is little interest in solving it when it is full steam ahead on a lightning network future.

dash is trash if it relies on masternodes.

also this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/61e645/good_to_remember_ethereum_and_monero_dont_have_a/

[David Rabahy]

The miners don't set the fee directly.  Essentially there is a dual auction; users bid up, while miners work down.

Users set the fee in each of their transactions often/mostly relying on automation to calculate it.  Even if every miner set a high minimum fee, if every user set their fees below that then eventually some miner would break rank in order to earn the lower fees.  But some users want a faster confirmation and so they set a higher fee.

Organizing users to act in unison to keep fees low seems unlikely.  Some users will break rank and use a slightly higher fee in order to get their transaction done quicker.  The users bid up the fees; the miners just take it happily.  The miners work down the fees; if the users united they could keep fees low.

Btw, I recently set a fee to 0 and it only took 11 days to confirm; Bitfury did it.  Your mileage may vary.  Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future behavior.  Be prepared to recover if your no-fee transaction doesn't ever commit.

[equator]

The miners don't set the fee directly.  Essentially there is a dual auction; users bid up, while miners work down.

Users set the fee in each of their transactions often/mostly relying on automation to calculate it.  Even if every miner set a high minimum fee, if every user set their fees below that then eventually some miner would break rank in order to earn the lower fees.  But some users want a faster confirmation and so they set a higher fee.

Organizing users to act in unison to keep fees low seems unlikely.  Some users will break rank and use a slightly higher fee in order to get their transaction done quicker.  The users bid up the fees; the miners just take it happily.  The miners work down the fees; if the users united they could keep fees low.

Btw, I recently set a fee to 0 and it only took 11 days to confirm; Bitfury did it.  Your mileage may vary.  Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future behavior.  Be prepared to recover if your no-fee transaction doesn't ever commit.

You are telling that it took 11 days to confirm the transaction with zero fee, but each of them cannot wait so long and if the online shop owners will wait so much time then it is not good for bitcoin. and what about if it got cancelled and returned to the sender. So it is always good to send with the correct fee to it get confirmation soon.

This is the main reason that is why the miner wanted the more faster and secure way of transaction, that they wanted to create BU

[deisik]

This is way off point but just to pick nits; Since there is only one fixed size block header then the ratio of transactions to block size does scale even in your definition although granted it is a tiny amount and not worthy of this mighty discussion.

I think we misunderstand each other because we are using a different definitions of scaling.

Recognizing this will help future discussions.

I really think that miners are just testing our patience here, they keep increasing the fees just to see to what point they can get a good amount of it without hurting the prices or the overall exchange market of the bitcoin, they are not afraid of making things worst because they know they can just hold the bitcoin for a while and that will make things go back to normal, there goes to show you how they have a strong control over the bitcoin

Users are setting the fees

Miners cannot increase the transaction fees but they can choose to ignore transactions with fees below certain limit. Or they can just ignore all transactions altogether (as some of them are deliberately doing). If there were plenty of miners as well as plenty of room in the blocks, that wouldn't be an issue since some of them (and I'd rather say most of them) would be including all transactions with or without fees. But since there is only a dozen of miners out there (call them mining pools or whatever, it doesn't matter), they can effectively and in unison bid the fees up. That's why mining monopoly is evil

[David Rabahy]

If I were a miner (too expensive for my taste) then I would configure my mining software to mine only 0-fee transactions unless it didn't fill a block in which case then I would include the lowest fee transactions until it filled a block up to the limit allowed.  I am not most people.

If the developers would develop a less expensive way to be a miner then I would appreciate it.  Perhaps they could let miners like me win ever so often (every tenth block?) if we produce a block full of 0-fee transactions?

[mindrust]

Bitcoin died when all those ASIC mining companies made appearance. We should do something about it and bring bitcoin mining back to home level. Mining companies made bitcoin centralized, that's all.

[BingoDog]

I don't think their intention is to destroy bitcoin, they live from it, but because mining has become realy expensive they have exaggerated with fees. Of course, that will not make them rich but they want to cover the expenses somehow. We'll see where this will bring us, but something has be changed because there should be balance and both miners and users should be satisfied.

[aarons6]

If I were a miner (too expensive for my taste) then I would configure my mining software to mine only 0-fee transactions unless it didn't fill a block in which case then I would include the lowest fee transactions until it filled a block up to the limit allowed.  I am not most people.

If the developers would develop a less expensive way to be a miner then I would appreciate it.  Perhaps they could let miners like me win ever so often (every tenth block?) if we produce a block full of 0-fee transactions?

i REALLY dont think people understand how mining works..

for one, its NOT THE MINERS that set the fee.. or choose to mine a certain fee, or really do anything..

everyone in this thread is saying MINERS this and MINERS that.. but, they should be saying MINING POOLS..

its the POOLS that set everything up.. and YES YOU CAN START YOUR OWN MINING POOL.. if you get enough miners on it, you can set it do mine zero fee tx's