Bitcoin adoption: A technical challenge

[aliashraf]

All in all, you're speaking about a "currency" and not a cryptographic element (experiment) anymore.
-snip-
Decentralization is never going to take place fully in the world of BTC ...
... We want Governments to get involved to stop criminal activities ... scaling will also not be easier ... Until Centralization remains, Privacy is ought to be compromised to various organizations where we will be storing our funds and need to meet their KYC AML obligations before we're able to get a hold on our funds back at many places.

You are almost advocating for an undocumented vision of bitcoin which is absolutely paradoxical. Bitcoin is not separable from its mission and its cause.
Without a purpose, there is no bitcoin as a promising technology worth dedicating our lives. A centralized, unscalable, KYC/AML friendly bitcoin is not entitled to carry the label. Such a discourse is contemplating a radically different system than bitcoin, maybe Ripple?

the technical part has been left to a smaller set of Devs who were already involved since the beginning.

This is the point: Without overcoming technical challenges there will be no infrastructure for sociopolitical campaigns, hence it is the canonical part.

[capodieci]

Cool... on this topic I found very relevant this blog post, in case you want to give it a look:

https://blogchainzoo.com/the-mass-adoption-of-the-blockchain-technology/

Cheers, and let me know!

Rob

[Dabs]

Those 3 things are being addressed, I think. Decentralization is due to many different miners and full nodes, many different devs contributing code. Scaling is being worked on by centralized entities such as off-chain solutions either with third party custodians, exchanges, web wallets, points thingies, token thingies. Privacy, at least on the bitcoin level, is being done by such things as CoinJoin, JoinMarket, Wasabi and all the other privacy tech by other altcoins that supposedly focus on them like Monero and ZCash.

As you implied, these things are being worked on separately (and maybe together) by different groups of people. They'll eventually come together, but understandably some things are prioritized depending on the group or devs working on them. If you're smart, you can take advantage of all three right now.

[aliashraf]

Cool... on this topic I found very relevant this blog post, in case you want to give it a look:

https://blogchainzoo.com/the-mass-adoption-of-the-blockchain-technology/

Cheers, and let me know!

Rob

Thanks for the link. It is focused on user experience and ease of use, it has been discussed above-thread shortly. It is critical and important but not exactly what I'm interested in because I think it is a result of rather than a cause for mass-adoption.

[aliashraf]

Those 3 things are being addressed, I think. Decentralization is due to many different miners and full nodes, many different devs contributing code. Scaling is being worked on by centralized entities such as off-chain solutions either with third party custodians, exchanges, web wallets, points thingies, token thingies. Privacy, at least on the bitcoin level, is being done by such things as CoinJoin, JoinMarket, Wasabi and all the other privacy tech by other altcoins that supposedly focus on them like Monero and ZCash.

As you implied, these things are being worked on separately (and maybe together) by different groups of people. They'll eventually come together, but understandably some things are prioritized depending on the group or devs working on them. If you're smart, you can take advantage of all three right now.

Mining is highly centralized because of pools, centralized services are not part of the game and shouldn't be considered a scaling solution and privacy gains from centralized services is not true privacy.

You are right though,  we can take advantage of and learn lessons from available centralized solutions. It is possible to re-define this project as an attempt to decentralize existent solutions to current shortcomings in bitcoin mining, scaling and privacy.

For Instance, you can imagine a built-in, on-chain coin join service for privacy. Actually, I've been contributing to such an idea a while ago and integrated it into my work lately.

[Wind_FURY]

Decentralization is due to many different miners and full nodes

But most of them join centralized pools, even though P2Pool exist.

Don't worry about the miners. The incentives will keep them honest. Plus ask yourself "Who actually secures Bitcoin?"

many different devs contributing code.

Good point, but most of them contribute on Bitcoin Core client.

That's actually good. It will keep the network working together in lock-step than having many different implementations.

[aliashraf]

Decentralization is due to many different miners and full nodes

But most of them join centralized pools, even though P2Pool exist.

Don't worry about the miners. The incentives will keep them honest. Plus ask yourself "Who actually secures Bitcoin?"

You mean we are all good? It is not true! Bitcoin is not perfect and we have lots of work to do.

Pools are centralization monsters, they should be thrown out of the ecosystem.

Scaling is a nightmare, we need tens of times better performance and lower fees.

The feds are watching wallets, we need built-in privacy support.

It is a bad political agenda, covering up the weaknesses of bitcoin, it eventually hurts bitcoin.

[Wind_FURY]

Decentralization is due to many different miners and full nodes

But most of them join centralized pools, even though P2Pool exist.

Don't worry about the miners. The incentives will keep them honest. Plus ask yourself "Who actually secures Bitcoin?"

I'm familiar with the game theory of PoW mining, but it's still a concern.

There are various covert attack which can be done by pool owners such as exclude certain transaction or block withholding attack.

I believe you didn't actually ask yourself who really secures Bitcoin. Is it the truly miners?

many different devs contributing code.

Good point, but most of them contribute on Bitcoin Core client.

That's actually good. It will keep the network working together in lock-step than having many different implementations.

I get the point, but history already prove monopoly is bad thing, it's limits creativity and progression.

But is it a monopoly? What "progress" and "creativity" were limited? No one can stop developers from their own implementations, or their own cryptocurrencies with "special features".

[aliashraf]

Decentralization is due to many different miners and full nodes

But most of them join centralized pools, even though P2Pool exist.

Don't worry about the miners. The incentives will keep them honest. Plus ask yourself "Who actually secures Bitcoin?"

I'm familiar with the game theory of PoW mining, but it's still a concern.

There are various covert attack which can be done by pool owners such as exclude certain transaction or block withholding attack.

I believe you didn't actually ask yourself who really secures Bitcoin. Is it the truly miners?

Sure it is or maybe you have invented a new theory about the security of the network. Miners are gods of PoW, full nodes are like angels with very limited power: to nod or not to nod, it is not enough for the security of bitcoin by any measure.

The bad thing about social media is its potential for spreading nonsense instead of science and this story, counting on full nodes instead of miners for securing bitcoin, is such nonsense. Otherwise show me a paper, a well-formed document at least, asserting such thing about bitcoin and PoW. Consider censorship resistance, for instance, suppose a Chinese "court" issues a verdict for blocking a list of bitcoin addresses and the gov asks pools to block the list, how could your full nodes help with this situation? They can't!
Let's instead of redefining bitcoin naively, for justifying the current situation with mining and pools, dedicate our time and resources to solve the problem professionally.

[Wind_FURY]

Decentralization is due to many different miners and full nodes

But most of them join centralized pools, even though P2Pool exist.

Don't worry about the miners. The incentives will keep them honest. Plus ask yourself "Who actually secures Bitcoin?"

I'm familiar with the game theory of PoW mining, but it's still a concern.

There are various covert attack which can be done by pool owners such as exclude certain transaction or block withholding attack.

I believe you didn't actually ask yourself who really secures Bitcoin. Is it the truly miners?

Sure it is or maybe you have invented a new theory about the security of the network. Miners are gods of PoW full nodes are like angels with very limited power: to nod or not to nod, it is not enough for the security of bitcoin by any measures.

The bad thing about social media is its potential for spreading nonsense instead of science and this story, counting on full nodes instead of miners for securing bitcoin, is such nonsense. Otherwise show me a paper, a well-formed document at least, asserting such thing about bitcoin and PoW. Consider censorship resistance, for instance, suppose a Chinese "court" issues a verdict for blocking a list of bitcoin addresses and the gov asks pools to block the list, how could your full nodes help with this situation? They can't!
Let's instead of redefining bitcoin naively, for justifying the current situation with mining and pools, dedicate our time and resources to solve the problem professionally.

Nonsense? You know it yourself, that miners have cartelized, and could collude. What stops them from doing that? Who rejects the changes imposed by miners, and how?

[Wynn1427]

@aliashraf

I tend to agree PoW does have some limits when it comes to scaling and decentralization. Believe this is the reason why we do have other systems in place such as PoS, DPoS and RPoS (have not seen much of RPoS in development at this point in time which intrigued me while reading various white papers on various projects). Biggest is is that the natural tendency is that most things actually centralize naturally. Just look at history of civilization, countries, cities, even users of technology can become so enamoured with one entity its the primary goto service. In terms of PoW and winner take all system, the pool/centralization solved the difficulty issue and turned it into a workable solution as opposed to a single person looking for the solution.

Have you had time to read the Ton white paper? From what I can tell it's solution is as hierarchical DPoS with various delegated groups to help the overall scaling effect (decentralized? not sure any DPoS can properly hold that definition). Have read through to try and understand the basic concepts and idea (don't claim to understand all of it, but only one way to learn is reading what others have written).

[target]

Along with the adoption there will be developments and project that will make anyone even your parents can swipe and pay for grocery products. Adoption will take place no matter what and just like computers where it starts with CLI til GUI was created for anyone to use, anyone can just swipe. You don't even have to be idealist nor a dev to see governments today starting government backed coin.

[aliashraf]

Decentralization is due to many different miners and full nodes

But most of them join centralized pools, even though P2Pool exist.

Don't worry about the miners. The incentives will keep them honest. Plus ask yourself "Who actually secures Bitcoin?"

I'm familiar with the game theory of PoW mining, but it's still a concern.

There are various covert attack which can be done by pool owners such as exclude certain transaction or block withholding attack.

I believe you didn't actually ask yourself who really secures Bitcoin. Is it the truly miners?

Sure it is or maybe you have invented a new theory about the security of the network. Miners are gods of PoW full nodes are like angels with very limited power: to nod or not to nod, it is not enough for the security of bitcoin by any measures.

The bad thing about social media is its potential for spreading nonsense instead of science and this story, counting on full nodes instead of miners for securing bitcoin, is such nonsense. Otherwise show me a paper, a well-formed document at least, asserting such thing about bitcoin and PoW. Consider censorship resistance, for instance, suppose a Chinese "court" issues a verdict for blocking a list of bitcoin addresses and the gov asks pools to block the list, how could your full nodes help with this situation? They can't!
Let's instead of redefining bitcoin naively, for justifying the current situation with mining and pools, dedicate our time and resources to solve the problem professionally.

Nonsense? You know it yourself, that miners have cartelized, and could collude. What stops them from doing that? Who rejects the changes imposed by miners, and how?

Pools do not collide because they have no incentive for collusion, it is their business they don't want to ruin it. Simple! But it is not called security, not at all, your funds in Binance is not secure neither your funds deposited in City Bank, shits may happen and you may lose your savings.

About the "rejection" issue: The hypothetical colliding pools don't need to break the consensus they can do a lot of things against users without wallets/full-nodes being aware of anything: double-spending attacks and censorship for instance.

Censorship is very important issue because pools are so vulnerable to this problem and have little incentive to resist again it because in short term it can be done without damaging bitcoin too much: users don't care about "a few addresses" being banned as long as they don't belong to the same minority or group of persons that suffer from such discriminations.

[Macadonian]

Censorship is very important issue because pools are so vulnerable to this problem and have little incentive to resist again it because in short term it can be done without damaging bitcoin too much: users don't care about "a few addresses" being banned as long as they don't belong to the same minority or group of persons that suffer from such discriminations.

The pools are not vulnerable to censorship themselves but the those that use Bitcoin are vulnerable of centralization by pools having a large majority of the percentage of mining power and this is only going to get worse with new people coming to Bitcoin and getting started with Bitcoin I would say over half would want to join a already established pool because it brings greater rewards and more often rewards. The only issue with that is the most popular pools will continue to gain miners and cause a monopoly which theoretically they could use that bad intentions.

[AverageGlabella]

Along with the adoption there will be developments and project that will make anyone even your parents can swipe and pay for grocery products. Adoption will take place no matter what and just like computers where it starts with CLI til GUI was created for anyone to use, anyone can just swipe. You don't even have to be idealist nor a dev to see governments today starting government backed coin.

This is naive. Adoption will not just take place and come as easy as that. At the moment Bitcoin is viewed as fake currency whenever you talk to someone about it and the perception of Bitcoin among the majority of the population is not a good one. To change that its going to take a lot of special individuals to spearhead campaigns to increase the reputation of Bitcoin.

[Wind_FURY]

Decentralization is due to many different miners and full nodes

But most of them join centralized pools, even though P2Pool exist.

Don't worry about the miners. The incentives will keep them honest. Plus ask yourself "Who actually secures Bitcoin?"

I'm familiar with the game theory of PoW mining, but it's still a concern.

There are various covert attack which can be done by pool owners such as exclude certain transaction or block withholding attack.

I believe you didn't actually ask yourself who really secures Bitcoin. Is it the truly miners?

Sure it is or maybe you have invented a new theory about the security of the network. Miners are gods of PoW full nodes are like angels with very limited power: to nod or not to nod, it is not enough for the security of bitcoin by any measures.

The bad thing about social media is its potential for spreading nonsense instead of science and this story, counting on full nodes instead of miners for securing bitcoin, is such nonsense. Otherwise show me a paper, a well-formed document at least, asserting such thing about bitcoin and PoW. Consider censorship resistance, for instance, suppose a Chinese "court" issues a verdict for blocking a list of bitcoin addresses and the gov asks pools to block the list, how could your full nodes help with this situation? They can't!
Let's instead of redefining bitcoin naively, for justifying the current situation with mining and pools, dedicate our time and resources to solve the problem professionally.

Nonsense? You know it yourself, that miners have cartelized, and could collude. What stops them from doing that? Who rejects the changes imposed by miners, and how?

Pools do not collide because they have no incentive for collusion, it is their business they don't want to ruin it.

Let me stop you there. I'm not only talking about costs, and incentives. I'm talking about miners/mining pools exerting "political pressure" on the network.

I'm familiar with the game theory of PoW mining, but it's still a concern.

There are various covert attack which can be done by pool owners such as exclude certain transaction or block withholding attack.

I believe you didn't actually ask yourself who really secures Bitcoin. Is it the truly miners?

1. Miners play part to secure the network, if hashrate is too low, cost to perform 51%, re-org and block withholding attack would be cheaper.
2. Can full node secure the network against attacks i mentioned above ?

P.S. i don't say miner is the only one who secures the network

1. Read my reply for aliasharif.

2. But how can we secure ourselves from a cartel of miners?

I get the point, but history already prove monopoly is bad thing, it's limits creativity and progression.

But is it a monopoly? What "progress" and "creativity" were limited? No one can stop developers from their own implementations, or their own cryptocurrencies with "special features".

No, but your earlier statement clearly support software monopoly.

I support a "software monopoly" because I believe that everything "should work in lock-step", not my words, research who. I only agree.

Plus not all developers are as competent as the Core developers.

[aliashraf]

Pools do not collide because they have no incentive for collusion, it is their business they don't want to ruin it.

Let me stop you there. I'm not only talking about costs, and incentives. I'm talking about miners/mining pools exerting "political pressure" on the network.
-snip-
{To @ETFbitcoin:}
1. Read my reply for aliasharif.

2. But how can we secure ourselves from a cartel of miners?

The problem with the current bitcoin implementation of PoW is how it encourages (actually,  imposes) the formation of such cartels AKA pools. I've thoroughly analyzed and proved this flaw to be incurable as long as we are dealing with a winner-takes-all approach to PoW.

[Wind_FURY]

Pools do not collide because they have no incentive for collusion, it is their business they don't want to ruin it.

Let me stop you there. I'm not only talking about costs, and incentives. I'm talking about miners/mining pools exerting "political pressure" on the network.
-snip-
{To @ETFbitcoin:}
1. Read my reply for aliasharif.

2. But how can we secure ourselves from a cartel of miners?

The problem with the current bitcoin implementation of PoW is how it encourages (actually,  imposes) the formation of such cartels AKA pools. I've thoroughly analyzed and proved this flaw to be incurable as long as we are dealing with a winner-takes-all approach to PoW.

I wouldn't call it a "flaw", but an inconvenience. But change the "winner-takes-all" approach, and you change the cost-incentive structure/game-theory, which is generally what keeps everything together.

[aliashraf]

Pools do not collide because they have no incentive for collusion, it is their business they don't want to ruin it.

Let me stop you there. I'm not only talking about costs, and incentives. I'm talking about miners/mining pools exerting "political pressure" on the network.
-snip-
{To @ETFbitcoin:}
1. Read my reply for aliasharif.

2. But how can we secure ourselves from a cartel of miners?

The problem with the current bitcoin implementation of PoW is how it encourages (actually,  imposes) the formation of such cartels AKA pools. I've thoroughly analyzed and proved this flaw to be incurable as long as we are dealing with a winner-takes-all approach to PoW.

I wouldn't call it a "flaw", but an inconvenience. But change the "winner-takes-all" approach, and you change the cost-incentive structure/game-theory, which is generally what keeps everything together.

It is a known flaw: https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin-system/wiki/Pooling-Pressure-Risk

Winner-takes-all has nothing to do with game theory and is not helpful in the cost-incentive tradeoffs involved in bitcoin. The very fact that we have pools right now shows that this model does not work and is replaced by a contributor-takes-share alternative using pools, unfortunately, pools are centralized entities.

[Wind_FURY]

1. Miners play part to secure the network, if hashrate is too low, cost to perform 51%, re-org and block withholding attack would be cheaper.
2. Can full node secure the network against attacks i mentioned above ?

P.S. i don't say miner is the only one who secures the network

1. Read my reply for aliasharif.

2. But how can we secure ourselves from a cartel of miners?

1. I get the point, but does it the change the fact low hashrate also risky?

No it doesn't. But the miners only have a small space to move even with 100% hashing power, because?

2. Answering question with question

Yes, because the answer is clear, and obvious. Who/what makes "the miners", the miners?

No, but your earlier statement clearly support software monopoly.

I support a "software monopoly" because I believe that everything "should work in lock-step", not my words, research who. I only agree.

Plus not all developers are as competent as the Core developers.

Good points. But don't forget many alternative full node client follow BIP to make sure their client "work in lock-step".

That doesn't assure the network to work in lock-step.