On Paul Sztorc’s BIP-300 proposal

[Wind_FURY]

I have recently went into a debate with some of the more well-informed/smarter people in the forum about POW, and why we should be open minded about upgrades for Bitcoin. Of course I was not the open minded one, and I didn’t agree with changing the POW with another algorithm, or another “mining mechanism”, because it would break the very thing that makes everything stick together in Bitcoin. The incentive structure.

BUT from technical perspective, I am asking those same people who told me to be open minded. What are your opinions on Paul Sztorc’s proposal? Should the community be open minded enough to campaign for this upgrade?

https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0300.mediawiki#Abstract

BIP: 300
Layer: Consensus (soft fork)
Title: Hashrate Escrows (Consensus layer)
Author: Paul Sztorc <truthcoin@gmail.com>
            CryptAxe <cryptaxe@gmail.com>
Comments-Summary: No comments yet.
Comments-URI: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/wiki/Comments:BIP-0300
Status: Draft
Type: Standards Track
Created: 2017-08-14
License: BSD-2-Clause
Post-History: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-May/014364.html

https://twitter.com/truthcoin/status/1404457426590576649

Bip300 (my project) allows us to:

* Shrink the layer1 blocksize
* Have ultra-strong zCash privacy/mixing
* Emulate any Altcoin (making Alt-marketing ~impossible)
* Scale BTC worldwide
* Painlessly activate new soft forks or even hard forks

And it is 100% opt in and reversible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oga8Pwbq9M0

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[Carlton Banks]

forget about it, it's already been debated and long forgotten


why is it you (windyFURY) always pop up with some "drama"? It's becoming quite a habit for you

[dkbit98]

If we can use Lighting Network then I don't see why we can't have Bitcoin sidechain and kill bunch of altcoins that are just a distraction and many of them are a scam.
This would be one option for improving privacy for Bitcoin without the need for using mixers or selling BTC for other privacy based coins.

Why would people who already use altcoin (such as zCash and Monero) moving back to Bitcoin sidechain, especially when their coin have lots of user and the sidechain barely have any user?

I can say the same thing for Lightning Network, but yeah LN is sponsored by some whales and advertised as a holly grail and ultimate solution for everything
Would people really use Monero or Zcash if Bitcoin had private transactions? No.

[BlackHatCoiner]

Would people really use Monero or Zcash if Bitcoin had private transactions? No.

No, they wouldn't, but Bitcoin doesn't have private transactions or to formulate it better it won't achieve the same privacy Monero offers. The lightning network surely removes footprints from the block chain, because off-chain transactions aren't publicly announced, but that's all it does. The node knows how much money I'm depositing and can track me down whenever the owners want. Even, if you ran your own lightning node, when you'll open a channel you'll expose your liquidity.

In Monero, you can't even track the transacted amount. Just like how electronic cash should be in the first place.

[NotATether]

If we can use Lighting Network then I don't see why we can't have Bitcoin sidechain and kill bunch of altcoins that are just a distraction and many of them are a scam.

This is not a purely technical objective you're trying to do here, what you want to be accomplished also requires social actions. It's not like you can make a BIP and then all altcoin stakeholders drop what they're doing and exclusively use BTC, many of them have their own reasons why they need/want to use Monero/Zcash/<XYZ coin #1>/<XYZ coin #2> or others, which people are never going to come to a consensus to with just new designs and technology alone. I fail to see how this is a problem in the first place.

Would people really use Monero or Zcash if Bitcoin had private transactions? No.

As far as I'm concerned, I don't see any problem (or particularly care) with whether people want to use bitcoin or not or which particular altcoin they use, it's not like the act of using one is a threat to bitcoin's existence.

* Scale BTC worldwide

This is more important to me than killing a bunch of altcoins.

[dkbit98]

This is not a purely technical objective you're trying to do here, what you want to be accomplished also requires social actions. It's not like you can make a BIP and then all altcoin stakeholders drop what they're doing and exclusively use BTC, many of them have their own reasons why they need/want to use Monero/Zcash/<XYZ coin #1>/<XYZ coin #2> or others, which people are never going to come to a consensus to with just new designs and technology alone. I fail to see how this is a problem in the first place.

I am not a technical expert, but I know a lot of people who would drop their holding of many altcoins and get back into Bitcoin if sidechains would enable better privacy.
All BIP proposals happened just like that, some people wrote a code, people tested it and see how it works, bugs got fixes, miners and nodes saw potential for improvements and profit and they accepted it.

As far as I'm concerned, I don't see any problem (or particularly care) with whether people want to use bitcoin or not or which particular altcoin they use, it's not like the act of using one is a threat to bitcoin's existence.

I really don't understand what are you talking about...
Bitcoin dominance is dropping for years and it was even below 40% recently so money is obviously going away in different distractions and stupid projects, so it's obviously affecting Bitcoin.

[NotATether]

As far as I'm concerned, I don't see any problem (or particularly care) with whether people want to use bitcoin or not or which particular altcoin they use, it's not like the act of using one is a threat to bitcoin's existence.

I really don't understand what are you talking about...
Bitcoin dominance is dropping for years and it was even below 40% recently so money is obviously going away in different distractions and stupid projects, so it's obviously affecting Bitcoin.

We have a much bigger problem than the % of people using bitcoin vs some other crypto.

The problem is that still, only 3.9% of the world's population uses crypto at all (this metric could be less if traders are excluded since they're not really hodlers IMO), the rest are only using cash, bank transfer, CCs, PayPal etc.

Without people and businesses using crypto, we are not going to see more services or stores that accept crypto as payment, be it in BTC, or BTC along with some other alt, as it makes no sense from a financial point of view for them to accept as payment a crypto with less users but not one with more users (BTC).

This is why most of the debate about coin superiority is irrelevant, because today's stores are either accepting BTC only or BTC alongside a bunch of alts.

If we can convince even double the number of crypto users to use bitcoin, that's 140% BTC users vs 60% altcoin users, and the loss of BTC users to various altocin projects,ICOs,DeFi etc etc will be negated.

And we can do this by:

1) tweaking the protocol to shrink block and transaction sizes like Segwit so that the blockchain doesn't grow too quickly for full nodes to store, and
2) finishing off all the nitty gritty details of our layer-2 solution, LN, because it still lacks a "topology specification" (I.e how nodes will connect to each other in a shortest path, without making any one node have too many connections thus centralizing it), right now it's something like "open channels with nodes that give you as less hops as possible" but no regulation on channel numbers.

These two improvements work hand-in-hand to allow many transactions per second to happen while also making each batch of them as small as possible on the disk. Which is exactly what BTC, more than any other coin, needs.

(And yes, there will be some people who won't like these changes and hard fork, this only underscores my point that new users must come and replace the old ones. We shouldn't be trying to bring them "back", we as a BTC community already have a bunch of opponents who will never change their minds about BTC)

[zbig001]

Would people really use Monero or Zcash if Bitcoin had private transactions? No.

Privacy is not a free lunch unfortunately since it comes at the cost of limitations in programmability.
On Monero, the equivalent of BIP-300 proposal would not be possible.

[JayJuanGee]

forget about it, it's already been debated and long forgotten

why is it you (windyFURY) always pop up with some "drama"? It's becoming quite a habit for you

I agree that Wind_FURY can be a bit of a drama queen sometimes, but I am curious if there are some good forum threads in which the discussion has been batted around regarding BIP300...( I did a quickie search, and I did not see anything).

I do see from the summary in the OP that BIP 300 appears to have been around since August 2017, and then I saw in Sztorc's Bitcoin 2021 presentation (that is linked in the OP) that Sztorc seemed to be saying that there was working testnet code.

Substantively, the idea does not really sound bad, unless it might be introducing some new attack vectors that cannot be mitigated very easily.  Sure shitcoins might have little to no incentive to develop links to their sidechains through BIP300 (presuming that it were to go through) becasue they want to print money, but there surely could be some bitcoiners who might want to use some of the functionality of one shitcoin or another (maybe we would not call them shitcoins any longer if they were pegged to bitcoin?) without having to worry about either the scammy nature of shitcoins printing money or other scam or bitcoin attacks that might seem to be going on through the shitcoin that is not pegged to bitcoin.

For sure, I do not claim to be technically astute enough to know if there would be sufficient interest for those sidechain links to be built in the event that BIP300 were to get implemented.

As far as I'm concerned, I don't see any problem (or particularly care) with whether people want to use bitcoin or not or which particular altcoin they use, it's not like the act of using one is a threat to bitcoin's existence.

I really don't understand what are you talking about...
Bitcoin dominance is dropping for years and it was even below 40% recently so money is obviously going away in different distractions and stupid projects, so it's obviously affecting Bitcoin.

We have a much bigger problem than the % of people using bitcoin vs some other crypto.

The problem is that still, only 3.9% of the world's population uses crypto at all (this metric could be less if traders are excluded since they're not really hodlers IMO), the rest are only using cash, bank transfer, CCs, PayPal etc.

Surely I am no fan of the vague-ass term "crypto."  What the fuck does that mean?

Seems to me that there needs to be specificity about what it is that they are using exactly in terms of coming up with some seemingly high ass number such as 3.9% usage of "crypto", and you, NotATether, seem to be asserting that even that number is low.. but what the fuck, I would be surprised if the number is even as high as 1%.. but sure then we get into the definition of what it means to "use" "crypto" and of course, let's get specific, and let's start out by figuring out what kinds of numbers of people are "using" king daddy.. fuck that other vague nonsense.. but sure, if there happens to be Ethereum and some stupid-ass defi, erc - 20 token, or other kind of token that they are using, do some of those even count for shit.. oh?  we have to consolidate all the various shitcoins to even get .1% perhaps?..

Let's say that they are counting some kind of "stable coin" as "crypto usage"?  That hardly means shit to me, if there is some coin or project out there that is somehow pegged to the dollar and someone is calling it crypto?  Does anyone else give any shits in bitcoinlandia about if there might be some dumbass stable coin being used to transact in one way or another and it is being classified as a "crypto"?  Who cares? 

Let's talk about king daddy bitcoin and the useage of king daddy and then go from there... that makes more sense, and probably we are talking about way less than 1% of the world's population that "uses" bitcoin in some kind of way meaning that they hold more than a de minimus amount or they might transact more than a de minimus amount in a year or whatever  timeframe we might want to try to put on this kind of an attempt at a "usuage" assessment.

[NotATether]

Let's talk about king daddy bitcoin and the useage of king daddy and then go from there.

Sure.

Seems to me that there needs to be specificity about what it is that they are using exactly in terms of coming up with some seemingly high ass number such as 3.9% usage of "crypto", and you, NotATether, seem to be asserting that even that number is low.. but what the fuck, I would be surprised if the number is even as high as 1%..
~snip

When you consider that the nearly all of the world's population are either using banks or hard cash (developed counties -> banks, developing countries -> cash), and even the ones that are using bitcoin have to use some kind of fiat off ramp occasionally, it is a big problem that you still can't pay for most of your real-world expenses using bitcoin. Namely because all the popular retailers aren't taking it, which had the side effect of uncountable smaller retailers not accepting it.

And an even bigger problem than this is getting people in poor countries to transact with each other in bitcoin instead of their nations' unstable currency so their life savings don't get severely devalued.

Yes 1% is too low an adoption rate. Even 4% users of bitcoin - without debating about the original statistic's reference because at this point I don't really care anymore - is too low from an ideological standpoint. We need AT LEAST 25% (arguably, in my opinion) of outlets accepting bitcoin as a payment method to be taken seriously by average developed country people, and we should also get an even higher rate for developing country residents - 80% or even 90%. To save them from more "chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks" situations*. El Salvador is a good start.

* Arguably the entire reason why Bitcoin was invented in the first place.

[JayJuanGee]

Let's talk about king daddy bitcoin and the useage of king daddy and then go from there.

Sure.

Seems to me that there needs to be specificity about what it is that they are using exactly in terms of coming up with some seemingly high ass number such as 3.9% usage of "crypto", and you, NotATether, seem to be asserting that even that number is low.. but what the fuck, I would be surprised if the number is even as high as 1%..
~snip

When you consider that the nearly all of the world's population are either using banks or hard cash (developed counties -> banks, developing countries -> cash), and even the ones that are using bitcoin have to use some kind of fiat off ramp occasionally, it is a big problem that you still can't pay for most of your real-world expenses using bitcoin. Namely because all the popular retailers aren't taking it, which had the side effect of uncountable smaller retailers not accepting it.

And an even bigger problem than this is getting people in poor countries to transact with each other in bitcoin instead of their nations' unstable currency so their life savings don't get severely devalued.

Yes 1% is too low an adoption rate. Even 4% users of bitcoin - without debating about the original statistic's reference because at this point I don't really care anymore - is too low from an ideological standpoint. We need AT LEAST 25% (arguably, in my opinion) of outlets accepting bitcoin as a payment method to be taken seriously by average developed country people, and we should also get an even higher rate for developing country residents - 80% or even 90%. To save them from more "chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks" situations*. El Salvador is a good start.

* Arguably the entire reason why Bitcoin was invented in the first place.

We might be straying from the topic of this thread, and I really was not trying to go too far into the weeds of either figuring out how to measure adoption and useage rates, but also going even further down the path of how much adoption is needed or preferred for bitcoin to be achieving various kinds of objectives.

We probably do not really disagree very much about the various objectives or even the deficiencies in some of the current sources that are telling us regarding how much adoption is currently taking place.

Personally, I hardly give any shits about suggesting that bitcoin "needs" x, y or z, because it seems to me that bitcoin is on the right path and whatever happens happens in terms of adoption.  In other words, in some sense, I am suggesting that the current case for bitcoin and even any reasonable future bitcoin trajectory seems bullish as fuck... nothing is broken.   

Adoption takes time and also developing various kinds of systems take time too...

So, perhaps, I am transitioning back to the topic of the thread in terms of whether there might be any urgency to get various shitcoins pegged to bitcoin as seems to be suggested in BIP300, no?  Many of us are likely to concede that shitcoins are NOT likely to go away soon, so why not figure out ways to potentially co-opt them into pegging onto bitcoin and to get away from their money printing tendencies .. and maybe even becoming more focused on providing various kinds of utility rather than incentivizing the scamming of people.  Another thing that many of us are likely to concede too is that whether shitcoins exist or NOT, the value is going to be absorbed into bitcoin, sooner or later, and maybe part of the question would be about whether BIP300 helps in the direction of facilitating the inevitable or would BIP300 either open up Bitcoin attack vectors or maybe give too much credence to various shitcoins while bitcoin may well just need to remain focused and engineered to facilitate its core competencies of secure and sound money?

[titular]

If we can use Lighting Network then I don't see why we can't have Bitcoin sidechain and kill bunch of altcoins that are just a distraction and many of them are a scam.
This would be one option for improving privacy for Bitcoin without the need for using mixers or selling BTC for other privacy based coins.

Why would people who already use altcoin (such as zCash and Monero) moving back to Bitcoin sidechain, especially when their coin have lots of user and the sidechain barely have any user?

I can say the same thing for Lightning Network, but yeah LN is sponsored by some whales and advertised as a holly grail and ultimate solution for everything
Would people really use Monero or Zcash if Bitcoin had private transactions? No.

Scam implies malicious motive which I doubt for many projects. Even though I find many of them redundant, calling them a scam is inaccurate.

[JayJuanGee]

If we can use Lighting Network then I don't see why we can't have Bitcoin sidechain and kill bunch of altcoins that are just a distraction and many of them are a scam.
This would be one option for improving privacy for Bitcoin without the need for using mixers or selling BTC for other privacy based coins.

Why would people who already use altcoin (such as zCash and Monero) moving back to Bitcoin sidechain, especially when their coin have lots of user and the sidechain barely have any user?

I can say the same thing for Lightning Network, but yeah LN is sponsored by some whales and advertised as a holly grail and ultimate solution for everything
Would people really use Monero or Zcash if Bitcoin had private transactions? No.

Scam implies malicious motive which I doubt for many projects. Even though I find many of them redundant, calling them a scam is inaccurate.

Probably safer (and more accurate) to presume anything that is not somehow related to bitcoin as a scam, unless proven otherwise, especially if part of the mission of the shitcoin, project, ICO, purported Defi baloney, NFT nonsense is either printing money or somehow attempting to compete with bitcoin (or denigrate bitcoin) rather than working along with bitcoin.

[kano]

...
Scam implies malicious motive which I doubt for many projects. Even though I find many of them redundant, calling them a scam is inaccurate.

You will have difficulty finding a scamcoin that wasn't created for the benefit of the creators - to make them money - usually also pump and dump.

Even well known coins like Litecoin fall directly into this category.
Charlie Lee created it so he could GPU mine, while everyone else CPU mined it, but claimed scrypt (with the low settings used) was GPU hostile ... for a year.

Eth is the worst case scenario for any crypto currency, since it's controlled by a bunch of people, and they even rolled back a transaction in the past.

Most coins are: a few people (creators) make a lot, a lot of people lose a little.
Same result as a pyramid scheme, which is by definition a 'scam'.
(unless of course the coin simply fails to make anyone any money )

[JayJuanGee]

Eth is the worst case scenario for any crypto currency, since it's controlled by a bunch of people, and they even rolled back a transaction in the past.

My understanding is that they obscured the quantity issued (who got them), there is lots of difficulties in either determining quantity of coins in existence and their future issuance is vague as fuck (even if there is supposed clarification) that leaves discretion.. including the fact they have simultaneous existence (of supposed value - by locking up coins) on two chains simultaneously.

Most coins are: a few people (creators) make a lot, a lot of people lose a little.
Same result as a pyramid scheme, which is by definition a 'scam'.
(unless of course the coin simply fails to make anyone any money )

One of the most creative dynamics of the shitcoin (scamcoin) space remains how creative that they can become to scam "wanna get rich quick" folks out of money.  They might end up with a coin/project that loses money for everyone from the getgo, but hey a few insiders still end up making money... funny how that works. 

Maybe should not even mention the scam of scam coins of ripple or hex, but Hex, for example, is designed in such a way that no matter what it makes the founder cry baby Richard Heart (he's not crying now) all kinds of money no matter how that shit performs, but of course there are "pumpamentals" contained therein, too because he designed it with a variety of pumpamentals. .maybe not much different than one coin.. but still alive and well because the founder has not yet disappeared. 

Other coins are just variations of the above-described scams - which is part of the reason why they should be presumed to be scams until a lot of evidence is provided to the contrary.. hardly any can prove themselves as non-scams... and perhaps a lot of what we are describing here regarding the already existence of shitcoins presumably being scams, so then why should there be a BIP (300) to facilitate their continued survival, so even if they are not able to actually scam by pegging to the BTC chain, the existence of a BTC peg (or side chain) may end up merely facilitating the ability of shitcoins to continue to scam people in their non-linked branches... so in some sense, maybe I am even talking myself out of being sympathetic for any supposed need or utility or benefit to bitcoin in seriously considering something like BIP300.. perhaps?  perhaps?

[Wind_FURY]

I don't know much, but ill bite for now.

* Shrink the layer1 blocksize

Do you have any plausible reason to reduce bitcoin on-chain block size limit?

Personally? No. But there are people smarter than me who do, or maybe they believe they do believe there’s a plausible reason. LukeDashjr. He doesn’t waste his time with us plebs in the forum though.

* Emulate any Altcoin (making Alt-marketing ~impossible)

Why would people who already use altcoin (such as zCash and Monero) moving back to Bitcoin sidechain, especially when their coin have lots of user and the sidechain barely have any user?

Maybe Bitcoiners will use them for the features. Why did some Bitcoiners become shitcoiners? Do you know the history of Ethereum, and how Vitalik announced the project in a room full of Bitcoiners in a conference, and they followed him to the next room to become Ethereum maximalists?

* Scale BTC worldwide
* Painlessly activate new soft forks or even hard forks

By moving the problem to sidechain.

Or the Lightning Network.

Are you for bigger blocks?

[Wind_FURY]

Do you have any plausible reason to reduce bitcoin on-chain block size limit?

Personally? No. But there are people smarter than me who do, or maybe they believe they do believe there’s a plausible reason. LukeDashjr. He doesn’t waste his time with us plebs in the forum though.

Then your point is meaningless if you don't mention any reason (whether it's your own reason or someone else).

Meaningless? No. It’s mentioned merely for reasons that it’s “possible”. But will it be reduced? No, maybe? I don’t know.

Why would people who already use altcoin (such as zCash and Monero) moving back to Bitcoin sidechain, especially when their coin have lots of user and the sidechain barely have any user?

Maybe Bitcoiners will use them for the features. Why did some Bitcoiners become shitcoiners? Do you know the history of Ethereum, and how Vitalik announced the project in a room full of Bitcoiners in a conference, and they followed him to the next room to become Ethereum maximalists?

My point is some altcoin already have head start where they have big user with many developer and research. Bitcoiner and few altcoiner might use the feature, but it's difficult to beat the altcoin on terms of popularity.

The point is Bitcoin can have all those “features” without sending Bitcoin to an exchange to buy a shitcoin. Plus head start in what? Perpetual motion machines? It’s still very early.

By moving the problem to sidechain.

Or the Lightning Network.

True, but we know LN doesn't solve all problem.

Are you for bigger blocks?

Yes^*

* Terms and Conditions Apply

OK understood, no judgement, merely curious.

[garlonicon]

But will it be reduced?

Miners can reduce block size at any time, without any soft-forks or things like that, all they have to do is just include less transactions, nothing else.

Are you for bigger blocks?

No, we don't need bigger blocks. All we need is compressing data more efficiently, for example by Pedersen Commitments or things like that. I can imagine introducing sidechains by that kind of commitments: if transaction joining is possible, then anyone can create and sign transaction sending coins somewhere for one satoshi per transaction. Then, that transaction will be valid on Bitcoin, but non-standard. Instead, it could be sent to the sidechain and mined there. Then, other people can move small amounts on the sidechain, just by joining transactions and implicitly increasing fee by single satoshi each time. Then, after few hundreds of transactions it can reach one satoshi per byte and be broadcasted to the mainchain's mempool and included in a block. When that happens, that transaction can be safely removed from the sidechain. It is nearly the same as LN, the only difference is that coins are protected not by punishment transactions, but by Proof of Work computing power. And that Proof of Work can be merge mined with Bitcoin! Even better: that sidechain could for example distribute rewards for 5,000 miners by preserving last 100 blocks! And because joining transactions would be possible, older transactions could be entirely removed from that sidechain, when they will settle on mainchain. Also, shares from different miners could be joined on sidechain before reaching mainchain and nobody would know if some miner is joining its own shares or maybe sending that coins to someone else.

[NotATether]

No, we don't need bigger blocks. All we need is compressing data more efficiently, for example by Pedersen Commitments or things like that.
~

I also support better compression by omitting redundant details. but as you said, a L2 sidechain will definitely be required to see this out.

Block size increases tend to get political given that you have to turn to clouds to store the whole blockchain as the rate of size increase becomes larger.

[Wind_FURY]

But will it be reduced?

Miners can reduce block size at any time, without any soft-forks or things like that, all they have to do is just include less transactions, nothing else.

But will they? There’s reason the block size is regulated because miners are incentivized to make the blocks as large as they can to collect more in fees. Especially when the block rewards are going closer to zero.

I believe that’s why Monero, because of its adaptive block size, has a tail-emission after all the coins are mined. But I am doubtful it will be truly tested until it reaches Bitcoin-like daily transaction volumes.

No, we don't need bigger blocks. All we need is compressing data more efficiently, for example by Pedersen Commitments or things like that.
~

I also support better compression by omitting redundant details. but as you said, a L2 sidechain will definitely be required to see this out.

Block size increases tend to get political given that you have to turn to clouds to store the whole blockchain as the rate of size increase becomes larger.

I don’t understand most of the talk, I’m the stupid one, but, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHIuuKCm53o