Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[smooth]

Maybe the reason is that Bitcoin only grows to the point where its network state provides adequate confidence and security. So you are looking at causality in the wrong direction. Maybe it would be much, much bigger if it were actually decentralized and it were in fact not possible for "the big three" to attack it and users/investors didn't have to rely on "why aren't they doing it".

is "not possible" achievable?  as JR asked, what distribution would make you happy?  of course, what makes you happy maybe won't satisfy marcus.

Maybe in a metaphysical sense it isn't but if it requires a non-trivial number of actors (e.g >3), who don't know each other, to collude, that becomes practically impossible.

What has the largest number of pools needed to achieve a majority ever been since pool mining got entrenched? 4 or 5?

This of course ignores selfish-mining type attacks where a strict majority might not even be needed.

here's what Ed Felten of Princeton thinks of selfish mining:

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/bitcoin-isnt-so-broken-after-all/

Yes that's why I wrote a majority might not be needed. I'm aware it is controversial.You can ignore that point though and it is still the case that security is much weaker with a small number of large pools. Are people going to be doing billion dollar-value transactions when a few sketchy pool operators (or their employees, or a hacker exploiting their pool) could steal it? No. Value can only grow as far as confidence permits and concentration undermines (or at least limits) confidence.

[1714213235]

1714213235

[1714213235]

1714213235

[cypherdoc]

Maybe in a metaphysical sense it isn't but if it requires a non-trivial number of actors (e.g >3), who don't know each other, to collude, that becomes practically impossible.

so to apply what Felten says in his paper, would you participate honestly in a coalition to cheat honest miners when you don't know your partners all of whom may be as dishonest as you?

What has the largest number of pools needed to achieve a majority ever been since pool mining got entrenched? 4 or 5?

i don't remember honestly.

[cypherdoc]

Maybe the reason is that Bitcoin only grows to the point where its network state provides adequate confidence and security. So you are looking at causality in the wrong direction. Maybe it would be much, much bigger if it were actually decentralized and it were in fact not possible for "the big three" to attack it and users/investors didn't have to rely on "why aren't they doing it".

is "not possible" achievable?  as JR asked, what distribution would make you happy?  of course, what makes you happy maybe won't satisfy marcus.

Maybe in a metaphysical sense it isn't but if it requires a non-trivial number of actors (e.g >3), who don't know each other, to collude, that becomes practically impossible.

What has the largest number of pools needed to achieve a majority ever been since pool mining got entrenched? 4 or 5?

This of course ignores selfish-mining type attacks where a strict majority might not even be needed.

here's what Ed Felten of Princeton thinks of selfish mining:

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/bitcoin-isnt-so-broken-after-all/

Yes that's why I wrote a majority might not be needed. I'm aware it is controversial.You can ignore that point though and it is still the case that security is much weaker with a small number of large pools. Are people going to be doing billion dollar-value transactions when a few sketchy pool operators (or their employees, or a hacker exploiting their pool) could steal it? No. Value can only grow as far as confidence permits and concentration undermines (or at least limits) confidence.

2 things:

1.  i think ppl under-appreciate the extent to which all participants in Bitcoin, including miners, volunteer and want to be part of a system that has the potential to make themselves extraordinary profits if it works as intended that being in an open, honest manner.  there's a lot at stake in constructing a new financial system and those profits can only be made if it works properly as advertised in that open and honest manner that ordinary ppl can depend on.  this is what will result in the trust needed so that the vast majority of humanity can buy into such a reliable system.

2.  i think that the majority of ppl in this world want to be honest and wish to live in a society that has order.  no one wants to live in chaos.  everybody loses.  in order for society to continue to progress and evolve, order, dependability, and a semblance of honesty is needed.  thus, in a system with so much potential to do good, like Bitcoin, the overwhelming desire is for participants to want to do what makes the system thrive.  to the extent that cheating, dishonesty, and colluding erodes confidence and threatens that goal, most participants will avoid those activities.

[rocks]

The discussion is not necessarily about performing an attack, it is about incentives and concentration of voting power. If the big pools want lower fees and/or a higher soft limit, because they are at a competitive advantage in providing the infrastructure required for it, then they get it, regardless of what the rest want. Likewise it has always been the prerogative of pools which transactions to include, so if they want to block some (as eligius does, I understand) then they will do that too. Neither of these rise to the level of an attack that causes the pool to be viewed as hostile and shunned by the community, but it gives disproportionate influence to a few actors.

Increasing blocksize increases the # of transactions allowed, which in turn increases the usage of bitcoin and the # of fee paying transactions, and this is how miners and pools will increase their fees. Increased fees lead to more monetary incentive to mine, which increases the hash rate and also the # of independent miners. This increases the bitcoin security mechanism.

gmaxwell on the other hand just suggested that we should lower the blocksize below 1MB in order to increase fee pressure.
http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/34090559/

This is frustrating; from a clean slate analysis of network health I think my conclusion would be to _decrease_ the limit below the current 300k/txn/day level.

This is simply absurd. His suggestion of limiting bitcoin to less than 1tps, as a means to increase the value of the bitcoin ecosystem is simply wrong.

To put it simply, a bitcoin that most people can not use directly and where blocks only contain 1000 transaction each, will generate a much smaller amount of economic value in fees than a bitcoin that is widely adopted by people and where blocks contain billions of transactions each.

[TPTB_need_war]

Maybe the reason is that Bitcoin only grows to the point where its network state provides adequate confidence and security. So you are looking at causality in the wrong direction. Maybe it would be much, much bigger if it were actually decentralized and it were in fact not possible for "the big three" to attack it and users/investors didn't have to rely on "why aren't they doing it".

is "not possible" achievable?  as JR asked, what distribution would make you happy?  of course, what makes you happy maybe won't satisfy marcus.

Maybe in a metaphysical sense it isn't but if it requires a non-trivial number of actors (e.g >3), who don't know each other, to collude, that becomes practically impossible.

What has the largest number of pools needed to achieve a majority ever been since pool mining got entrenched? 4 or 5?

This of course ignores selfish-mining type attacks where a strict majority might not even be needed.

here's what Ed Felten of Princeton thinks of selfish mining:

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/bitcoin-isnt-so-broken-after-all/

Yes that's why I wrote a majority might not be needed. I'm aware it is controversial.You can ignore that point though and it is still the case that security is much weaker with a small number of large pools. Are people going to be doing billion dollar-value transactions when a few sketchy pool operators (or their employees, or a hacker exploiting their pool) could steal it? No. Value can only grow as far as confidence permits and concentration undermines (or at least limits) confidence.

And so what is your proposed solution to the inherent concentration of pools due to variance cost of smaller pools?

And that doesn't apply only to billion txs but also to for example trusting to hold significant crypto-currency over gold.

Remember I had pointed out that in theory P2Pool is vulnerable to share withholding attack even with a fix (as all pools are in Bitcoin because the fix has not been made to Bitcoin, but a centralized pool could more viably using profiling to defeat share withholding) because those submitting shares can see the solution and withhold if they have the winning block hash. The only economic reason to do this is to discourage P2Pools, because the withheld share is lost profit for the holder of the withheld share. However this is asymmetric cost, because the holder has profited most of the time on all the others who don't withhold. Thus P2Pool can be defeated by those with vested interested in large pools.

-AnonyMint

[cypherdoc]

My bold emphasis.  If even 100MB might be "less devastating" to decentralization in a few years, then the capacity of the network must be improving by a fraction of that each year. Why not limit to 3,5,10 or even 20MB right now, when blocks of these larger sizes are still years off, but improving capacity rises to meet the limit? Something has seriously changed in his thinking, so that the idea that of hitting the 1MB is now fine. This is new and dangerous ground.

personally, i think this is what $21M in investment money on your back will do to one's thinking.  there has to be enormous pressure on him and i'm sure those investors are constantly talking to him demanding progress reports.  many of them probably read this forum and maybe this thread to monitor opposition to Blockstream.  they then go report back to gmax.  i definitely have a hard time following his writing and logic sometimes when it comes to things non-cryptographic.  he may be confused.  maybe this, in reality, is where the pressure is coming from that marcus refers to.

i think even if you disagree with me on my supposition that SC's are a competitor to Bitcoin, i think it's pretty easy to see that gmax sees Bitcoin as a competitor to SC's.

[solex]

Cypher, I rarely delete my posts, but I just got rid of the one quoted above, because I just read down further on gmaxwell's post:

This is frustrating; from a clean slate analysis of network
health I think my conclusion would be to _decrease_ the limit below the
current 300k/txn/day level.

This is obviously not acceptable, so instead many people--myself
included--have been working feverishly hard behind the scenes on Bitcoin
Core to increase the scalability.

I want to wait until I see his final word on the matter because, like Peter Todd saying the limit can be increased "eventually", he may still decide to "ack" Gavin's change.
Yep. The SC situation is a whole other complex matter which needs to be observed closely.

[cypherdoc]

Cypher, I rarely delete my posts, but I just got rid of the one quoted above, because I just read down further on gmaxwell's post:

This is frustrating; from a clean slate analysis of network
health I think my conclusion would be to _decrease_ the limit below the
current 300k/txn/day level.

This is obviously not acceptable, so instead many people--myself
included--have been working feverishly hard behind the scenes on Bitcoin
Core to increase the scalability.

ok, me too.

[TPTB_need_war]

2.  i think that the majority of ppl in this world want to be honest and wish to live in a society that has order.  no one wants to live in chaos.  everybody loses.  in order for society to continue to progress and evolve, order, dependability, and a semblance of honesty is needed.  thus, in a system with so much potential to do good, like Bitcoin, the overwhelming desire is for participants to want to do what makes the system thrive.  to the extent that cheating, dishonesty, and colluding erodes confidence and threatens that goal, most participants will avoid those activities.

That is the same faith we put into a top-down democracy. Fact is a power vacuum sucks in those who can maximize the exploitation of the power vacuum.

You are violating the fundamental tenet of Satoshi's white paper which is decentralized trust, meaning we don't have to trust that people are honest.

You are blacksliding because there doesn't appear to be any solution the fact that pools become concentrated due to the variance cost to them not. It is pure economics.

Now what are the proposed solutions?

If there are none, we are just lying to ourselves and the decentralization is a mirage. And smooth's valuation statement follows accordingly.

As for the scaling of Bitcoin, they will never get there because there are these fundamental problems, such as the design decision to charge a transaction fee and the need to propagate all the transaction data before a new block can be started.

There are fundamental design errors here. Very very fundamental.

Who is going to fix this? And pronto!

Looks like this is not so simple after all....

http://gavinandresen.ninja/utxo-uhoh

The can-kick might only be to 2 or 3MB while efficiencies in UTXO storage are worked on.

There is a fundamental design error. They are just farting around the edges without going to the heart-of-the-matter, which is that transactions need to be orthogonal to blocks.

Bitcoin is headed towards centralization at a few servers. It was designed that way!

[sidhujag]

from gmax:

"So far the mining ecosystem has become incredibly centralized over time."

i totally disagree.  the trend has been back towards decentralization since ghash and ghash has been punished accordingly by the market down to a measly 3.6%.  what i see in this graph is a normal, expected distribution gradient from large to small share.  btw, gmax has been complaining about mining centralization since at least 2012 but yet here we are.  why do we accept his arguments on this when there hasn't been one major incident of a 51% attack?:

What people seem to keep missing in this "mining is centralized" claim, is that pools are not miners. They are services with ZERO barriers to entry and exit from the mining community.

As long as there is ONE honest P2P node who would publicly flag that a pool was behaving badly (an assumption I believe will always be true), then the pools can not abuse their position.

If any corrupt pool, or collection of corrupt pools, tried to falsify the record, it would immediately become public and that pool would lose most of it's miners in a matter of hours. Miners could simply switch to another honest pool, and there will always be an honest pool to switch to.

This would completely destroy the future profit stream for an established pool. Why the heck would anyone try this, especially given that it would be a futile effort?

+100 Mining is decentralized QED.

[Adrian-x]

There is a fundamental design error. They are just farting around the edges without going to the heart-of-the-matter, which is that transactions need to be orthogonal to blocks.

Bitcoin is headed towards centralization at a few servers. It was designed that way!

Is that you MofG anyway I'm Breaking the rule to not post under the influence.

So on that point and in the words of the creator

The nature of Bitcoin is such that once version 0.1 was released, the core design was set in stone for the rest of its lifetime

Yes, (we will not find a solution to political problems in cryptography), but we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years

[tvbcof]

marcus, for Bitcoin to act as digital gold it is not enough to simply have scarcity.  it's too early.  it needs to become known, disseminated to all corners of the Earth, be used on a reliable basis and w/o problems, and over many years.
...

Put another way: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,"

[justusranvier]

You are violating the fundamental tenet of Satoshi's white paper which is decentralized trust, meaning we don't have to trust that people are honest.

Have you even read the Bitcoin whitepaper?

The incentive may help encourage nodes to stay honest. If a greedy attacker is able to assemble more CPU power than all the honest nodes, he would have to choose between using it to defraud people by stealing back his payments, or using it to generate new coins. He ought to find it more profitable to play by the rules, such rules that favour him with more new coins than everyone else combined, than to undermine the system and the validity of his own wealth.

[TPTB_need_war]

from gmax:

"So far the mining ecosystem has become incredibly centralized over time."

i totally disagree.  the trend has been back towards decentralization since ghash and ghash has been punished accordingly by the market down to a measly 3.6%.  what i see in this graph is a normal, expected distribution gradient from large to small share.  btw, gmax has been complaining about mining centralization since at least 2012 but yet here we are.  why do we accept his arguments on this when there hasn't been one major incident of a 51% attack?:

How do you know the owners of the former double-digit pools don't control several of the single digit percentage pools, i.e. a Sybil attack is present?

How do you know that the owners are not purposefully attempting to distribute their miners across several different pools (all under the same management), i.e. a Sybil attack is present?

The fact that there isn't a visible attack (Sybil attacks are often invisible) doesn't impart any information on whether Bitcoin pools are becoming owned by a few. You can attempt to make the argument (below) that control over the pools isn't a problem, but that is a sometimes orthogonal argument to whether Bitcoin pools are centralized.

What people seem to keep missing in this "mining is centralized" claim, is that pools are not miners. They are services with ZERO barriers to entry and exit from the mining community.

ZERO barriers means a Sybil attack is plausible.

ZERO barriers often implies there is no way to defend market-share and profits. Thus it is a power vacuum to be exploited by those who don't want profits, but rather willing to lose money because they want control (and external profits from that control).

As long as there is ONE honest P2P node who would publicly flag that a pool was behaving badly (an assumption I believe will always be true), then the pools can not abuse their position.

If the pools have 50% of the hashrate, then any flag from a minority is ignored. Do you mean make a political statement to the miners imploring them to stop using the offending pools?

So what if the pool owners distribute their miners across 100s of pools they own (which appears to me to be what they have done). You going to play political Whack-A-Mole? Sybil attacks are very difficult to deal with.



And more so implausible game of Whack-A-Mole when they aren't do any falsification, rather just refusing to include certain ("unapproved") transactions. As their hashrate approaches 100%, the have a Digital Kill Switch on humanity.

And what do you do when the government has dictated that only registered and licensed entities can be pools? Then the ZERO cost shifts to INFINITE cost for those who don't sell out to those in control of the power vacuum of the democracy-lie.

If any corrupt pool, or collection of corrupt pools, tried to falsify the record, it would immediately become public and that pool would lose most of it's miners in a matter of hours. Miners could simply switch to another honest pool, and there will always be an honest pool to switch to.

This would completely destroy the future profit stream for an established pool. Why the heck would anyone try this, especially given that it would be a futile effort?

+100 Mining is decentralized QED.

If they are wise they do the falsifications from 100s of smaller pools with a Sybil attack. This forces you to the bigger pools with reputations, then they can do it from the bigger pools too.

How can you win? If a pool establishes a good reputation and is not part of the cartel, they will use the same methods they used to capture monopolies else where such as murdering the owners if necessary or more simply just offering pools free-of-charge or even pay miners extra to mine at their pools driving the honest pools bankrupt.

Sorry you can not win.

Bitcoin is fatally flawed and will end up a centralized bankster coin. I warned that in 2013. See my linked essay above.

[molecular]

Looks like this is not so simple after all....

http://gavinandresen.ninja/utxo-uhoh

The can-kick might only be to 2 or 3MB while efficiencies in UTXO storage are worked on.

There is a fundamental design error. They are just farting around the edges without going to the heart-of-the-matter, which is that transactions need to be orthogonal to blocks.

Bitcoin is headed towards centralization at a few servers. It was designed that way!

What do you mean by the bolded part?

[TPTB_need_war]

There is a fundamental design error. They are just farting around the edges without going to the heart-of-the-matter, which is that transactions need to be orthogonal to blocks.

Bitcoin is headed towards centralization at a few servers. It was designed that way!

Is that you MofG anyway I'm Breaking the rule to not post under the influence.

So on that point and in the words of the creator

The nature of Bitcoin is such that once version 0.1 was released, the core design was set in stone for the rest of its lifetime

Yes, (we will not find a solution to political problems in cryptography), but we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years

I am the former AnonyMint.

I agree with Satoshi. Even though Bitcoin is destined by design to become the centralized bankster coin that they (the DEEP STATE or NSA) commissioned, it can for the time being be used anonymously if careful and it is the reserve currency of the altcoins and thus is building an altcoin ecosystem wherein the superior design can be realized.

Perhaps "Satoshi" outsmarted his handlers. That would be historically the wise way an engineer would fool those he works for (knowing that they would continue without him anyway).

[TPTB_need_war]

You are violating the fundamental tenet of Satoshi's white paper which is decentralized trust, meaning we don't have to trust that people are honest.

Have you even read the Bitcoin whitepaper?

The incentive may help encourage nodes to stay honest. If a greedy attacker is able to assemble more CPU power than all the honest nodes, he would have to choose between using it to defraud people by stealing back his payments, or using it to generate new coins. He ought to find it more profitable to play by the rules, such rules that favour him with more new coins than everyone else combined, than to undermine the system and the validity of his own wealth.

You've always been the disingenuous debater in every discussion I've ever had with you.

You know damn well that Satoshi's major invention was Proof-of-Work in Section 4 as solution to the Byzantine General's Problem of how to trust an outcome without trusting the participants.

The above Satoshi quote as an aside at the bottom of section 6 (not even the main point of section 6) is stating that the abnormal case of 50% attack where Proof-of-Work fails would disincentivized if the entities doing the attack also is vested in a lot of coins. But that doesn't even cover the case where the entities doing the attack don't have a lot of coins.

Sheesh you and your wise cracks. You know damn well I read the whitepaper.

[TPTB_need_war]

Looks like this is not so simple after all....

http://gavinandresen.ninja/utxo-uhoh

The can-kick might only be to 2 or 3MB while efficiencies in UTXO storage are worked on.

There is a fundamental design error. They are just farting around the edges without going to the heart-of-the-matter, which is that transactions need to be orthogonal to blocks.

Bitcoin is headed towards centralization at a few servers. It was designed that way!

What do you mean by the bolded part?

So what do I get for revealing the details now (versus working in private to implement and earn money on an altcoin)?

I have solved the design problem. I now know the Holy Grail design we need for crypto-currency.

I will give you one hint. Adjustments to difficulty are no longer critical.

Edit: I will give you one more hint. Bitcoin's design conflated what is centralized with what can be decentralized, thus causing the entire design to have a centralized final destiny. The solution is to unconflate.

[sickpig]

Since then, Rusty's LN paper has appeared, and there is even less reason for delay in buying time, because there is a very real chance that a high-volume layer can be built over Bitcoin while keeping main-chain usage to a minimum. Why won't the devs buy a few years?

sorry I've 0 time to contribute to discussion to any degree of usefulness, just a minor nitpick Lightning Network isn't a Rusty Russel's creation,  Joseph Poon and Thaddeus Dryja are the main authors. That said Rusty provide a fantastic series of posts explaining the key concepts behind LN: http://rusty.ozlabs.org/?p=450.

One last thing Rusty was recently hired by blockstream.

[TPTB_need_war]

Edit: I will give you one more hint. Bitcoin's design conflated what is centralized with what can be decentralized, thus causing the entire design to have a centralized final destiny. The solution is to unconflate.

It is sort of like how we felt when we read Satoshi's whitepaper, "why didn't I think of that!". Adam Back's hashcash concept was already known. The Satoshi Proof-of-Work was a fairly obvious step, but yet no one saw it until he published.

When this hit me in the forehead, my reaction was "this is sort of obvious, it must have a flaw because surely someone else thought of this before". So I as I dug into potential pitfalls it became more clear to me why others may not have entertained this idea before. The key is that true decentralization arises from careful use of centralization and that is what I believe makes the concept non-obvious, even though once it is revealed it seems quite simple and obvious.