Soft Fork | Can the users who didn't update their client still mine blocks?

[gmaxwell]

Lets consider SegWit transactions; to a pre-SegWit node any transaction that starts with 010000000001... (has the 2 byte SegWit flag) is an invalid transaction because the decoder sees this as a tx with 0 inputs.

The txn as committed to by the transaction hash doesn't have that flag and *that* is what the rule actually enforces.  The system's consensus rules don't care anything about what you send across network connections or store on your disk, and it certainly doesn't care about what nodes far away from you send across wires.  They care only about the stuff that contribute to the cryptographic commitments in the blocks, and they care about them only in extremely specific, and often obscure ways.

Before SegWit any block that was bigger than 1,000,000 bytes in size was invalid, this rule was completely removed and new computation took its place and today blocks can be as big as almost 4,000,000 byte in size (I'm not talking about weight but raw bytes).

Similarly here: The original rule said something about the data that went into transaction hashes.  Weight is constructed in such a way that 4m weight implies 1M size from the perspective of the old rule.

The thing is-- the rule is *exactly* what it is.  The rule isn't what some person assumed it to be, only what it actually was.  There was never a "block size" limit in the rules of the system, not in the general, informal, and human sense of the term: the system actually implemented a very specific rule which limited size in a very specific way. Just as you wouldn't say that including a hash of a 2TB document in an op_return didn't violate the size limit. The thing it did kinda mapped to a limit on the size of the blocks, but no complex mathematical object (which is what the rules are) ever maps exactly to our natural concepts.  This is why designing cryptosystems is so hard: It's way too easy to let our intuitive understanding cloud our vision of the true behavior. The Bitcoin system itself only enforces the true behavior, not our human intuition, enforcing that is left up to us.


    Spoon boy : Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth.
    Neo : What truth?
    Spoon boy : There is no spoon.
    Neo : There is no spoon?
    Spoon boy : Then you'll see, that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.


This is also why some people's intuition that soft forks are automatically 'safe' is wrong. They're only safe if the community uses them in safe ways, and a lot of thought and engineering goes into the softforks people right to try to maximize their safety.  Nothing about any of this is automatically safe.  Soft forks really do only restrict rules since that is the necessary (and pretty much sufficient) criteria for compatibility and that sounds fairly benign but the rules they restrict are the inhuman rules of The Blind Idiot God at the heart of the system, not the human intuition that approximates them that lives in our hearts as what we believe to be Bitcoin.  The true rules of Bitcoin and our intuitions almost always match, sure, but they differ in the details and the details are critically important.

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[franky1]

Before SegWit any block that was bigger than 1,000,000 bytes in size was invalid, this rule was completely removed and new computation took its place and today blocks can be as big as almost 4,000,000 byte in size (I'm not talking about weight but raw bytes).

Similarly here: The original rule said something about the data that went into transaction hashes.  Weight is constructed in such a way that 4m weight implies 1M size from the perspective of the old rule.

The thing is-- the rule is *exactly* what it is.  The rule isn't what some person assumed it to be, only what it actually was.  There was never a "block size" limit in the rules of the system, not in the general, informal, and human sense of the term: the system actually implemented a very specific rule which limited size in a very specific way.

seems gmax wants to cause more confusion
argument 1:
--there was never a "blocksize" limit in the rules of the system
--the system actually implemented a very specific rule which limited size in a very specific way

which is it
in short gmax(there are no rules) gmax(there are rules) thus debunking HIMSELF in under 1 sentence gap

argument 2:
--segwit took its place and blocks can be as big as almost 4,000,000 bytes in size
--weight is constructed in such a way that 4mill weight implies 1m size from the perspective of the old rule
--and yet old nodes say "any block bigger than 1,000,000 bytes in size is invalid"

so the rules are not specific. they are gludgy by doing a miscounting or division/multiplication trick  and removal of parts of transaction data for old nodes. and miscounting bytes for new nodes

even deeper debate can be that the "almost 4,000,000 bytes". does not and never will equate to an almost 4x transaction count of the 1mb pre2017 ruleset
..
so if gmax can clarify argument 1.. if there actually was a specific rule..
it would then help to clarify argument 2 about the gludgy math trick to make 1.5mb average right now appear as a 1mb rule to old nodes requires trimming off the witness(scripts)  and be 1mb of data with missing sections
but be 1.5mb of real hard drive on new nodes whilst being told its 4m weight
yep 1.5mb of real data being described as 4m weight. does not mean the blockchains 4m weight rule is a 4mb rule.. nor a "almost 4,000,000 bytes" as the true bytes are only ~1.5mb
hense cludgy

....
if he was simply trying to make a point about the human perspective vs the computer code rules.
he would have been far better using the raw tx, block data  vs cores GUI human visual. to say:

    Spoon boy : Do not try and spend the BTC. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth.
    Neo : What truth?
    Spoon boy : There is no BTC.
    Neo : There is no BTC?
    Spoon boy : Then you'll see, that it is not the BTC that spends, it is only your sats.