Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[tvbcof]

BTW, iCEBREAKER, thanks for getting me to finally look up what the Dunning-Kruger effect was by applying it to Frap.doc here.  nAILED-It.

typical response from you.

having no counter argument, you default resort to ad hominem.

There is really nothing here which bears 'arguing.'  When a differential in capabilities is above a certain level it simply makes no sense to engage in a conversation.  Rest assured, some people get it and have benefited by our conversation even if you have not.

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[rocks]

with RBF, does the sender have the ability to completely change the destination address back to himself?

What's your problem with that?  It's his money until it's not.

Oh, Bitcoin is not a real-time system in spite of years of propaganda trying to make it so?  How sad.  I think I'm going to cry.

Except that Bitcoin does function as a real-time system for most use cases today perfectly fine. There is an entire Bitcoin ecommerce industry that proves you wrong.

[cypherdoc]

if you're saying where we're going is Moon, then how can a 1MB cap (assuming SC or LN take a year) even with wallet fee capability, result in a smoothly adjusting fee increase as we consistently hit the 1MB cap?  if anything, it will go parabolic in a chaotic fashion and result in extremely poor user experience and subsequent rejection.

Because it can be economically expected that most transactions now are low priority, since fees are cheap. This means the actual transaction volume that likely would be taking place given only somewhat more expensive fees is much, much less. It's should be obvious enough that if transactions were completely free people would spam like crazy. That's not a judgment on the validity of those transactions; it's just economic reality. People start to economize dramatically when there is even a marginally-above-zero cost versus when there isn't.

This is in no way suggesting 1MB is sufficient, but it's not helpful to pretend that transaction volume when fees are negligible will remain the same if fees go to merely tiny. In no other market would we expect such a thing, and for all we know we could easily be talking about order-of-magnitude differences in volume from a fee increase that still presents no real pain for any major use case.

but cheap to who, you?  i remember an Indian standing up at the San Jose conf during Q&A and complaining about high tx fees for ppl in his country.  and they are, given their relative income levels. 

we should be promoting Bitcoin to these 3rd world countries where a .0001 minimum fee is arguably expensive.  that's why we have the  economic fee choice of .00001 which oftentimes still results in rejection.  to take it further, do you believe that Bitcoin should offer even these Indians the ability to buy a cup of coffee for cheap fees?  i think so but probably you think different.  i know tvbcof and iCE would flat out say no way.  but then that goes back to my argument that for maximum decentralization and to become digital gold Bitcoin needs to service these ppl.

when you say ppl will spam like crazy, don't you trust that the miners can react to filter that spam, if they so choose?  the problem with the 1MB choke approach is that yes, new users will be forced to economize on their tx's.  OR just leave.

[Peter R]

I think tvbcof means to say Bitcoin wasn't ever going to be useful for point of sales. (I assume that means Bitcoin by itself.)

In the interest of not repeating old points, this is what Hearn has to say on this: https://medium.com/@octskyward/replace-by-fee-43edd9a1dd6d

Right.  I think the people pushing full-RBF are more interested in making on-chain Bitcoin transactions less useful for point-of-sales than the often-stated goal of allowing users to "unstick" stuck transactions.  Since we can "unstick" a TX in ways that are first-seen safe, why break a system (zero-confirm TXs) that many people currently enjoy (well unless you're of the ideology that Bitcoin should only be a settlement backbone)?    

[rocks]

The replace-by-fee mechanism allows the sender to change a transaction and increase a fee, while the child-pays-parent mechanism allows a receiver to add a fee to an existing transaction.

In most cases (and all cases with a smart wallet), child-pays-parent allows both sender or receiver to add a fee to an existing transaction.  The reason is that in most cases, a transaction contains an output that returns change to the sender.  This means the sender can create a child transaction that re-spends this change output, thereby increasing the parent's effective fee.  

And this is why RBF is completely contrary to the ethos of Bitcoin. Bitcoin was designed so that transactions can not be canceled and so that once a receiver takes control of BTC they have full control. The P2P network rejecting 2nd seen transactions is one aspect of that mechanism, the blockchain record is another.

Agreed.

RBF transfers power from the receiver and puts it back in the hands of the sender. With RBF after two people make an exchange, the sender now has the ability to reach into the receivers pocket and take the sent BTC back. This is horrifying.

In the case of non-FFS, I agree.  

I was referring to RBF as full-RBF in your terminology, we are in agreement on the above.

[cypherdoc]

with RBF, does the sender have the ability to completely change the destination address back to himself?

What's your problem with that?  It's his money until it's not.

Oh, Bitcoin is not a real-time system in spite of years of propaganda trying to make it so?  How sad.  I think I'm going to cry.

Except that Bitcoin does function as a real-time system for most use cases today perfectly fine. There is an entire Bitcoin ecommerce industry that proves you wrong.

precisely.

[tvbcof]

I think tvbcof means to say Bitcoin wasn't ever going to be useful for point of sales. (I assume that means Bitcoin by itself.)

In the interest of not repeating old points, this is what Hearn has to say on this: https://medium.com/@octskyward/replace-by-fee-43edd9a1dd6d

Ah, Mr. Hearn.  Cypherdoc's giant among men.  I like Peter Todd's latest rendition which seems to be something like:  'The storm is coming but won't arrive until all non-hackers have had a fair chance to get on the lifeboats currently under construction.'

[Erdogan]

blocks full again with TPS unacceptably high --> unconf tx set ~ 3000, more than double normal.  pools taking defensive action.  when will Blockstream devs do something?:

Why do you call this "defensive" action?

when Chinese pools face a series of what they consider to be "large blocks", which in this case means full blocks as you can see from the data, they automatically switch to mining "header" blocks with 0 tx's during the time it takes to process all the tx's in the preceding large block.  this is b/c large blocks take a bit more time to process and check all the signatures so the argument goes that they can't afford to waste that precious time so for defensive purposed they just go ahead and start hashing  the next block with only the  "header" that in this case contain no tx's that might have included an invalid input from the preceding large block.

How about: When they see a new block, they immediately start mining based on that, with an empty transaction list. When they have removed the transactions in the last block from their own list of transactions to include, they mine with the new list. If a block is found quickly, it will be the empty block, else it will be a block with the new list.

You can see that the zero transaction blocks always come a short time after the previous. But they should not need minutes to establish a new list, so I am not sure.

Maybe some miner can chime in and say what really is going on.

your first paragraph was correct.

i'm not sure why the 0 tx blocks come so fast after the previous block.  i keep asking this.

it's the sigop checking of a large block, i believe, that takes the extra time.

Well my first paragraph suggested a reason. They need time to construct a new transaction list. When that is done, new transactions can more easily be added. The first list is the time consuming part.

Edit: The block finding is completely random. It is just as probable to find a block the first second, as after several minutes.

[tvbcof]

I think tvbcof means to say Bitcoin wasn't ever going to be useful for point of sales. (I assume that means Bitcoin by itself.)

In the interest of not repeating old points, this is what Hearn has to say on this: https://medium.com/@octskyward/replace-by-fee-43edd9a1dd6d

Right.  I think the people pushing full-RBF are more interested in making on-chain Bitcoin transactions less useful for point-of-sales than the often-stated goal of allowing users to "unstick" stuck transactions.  Since we can "unstick" a TX in ways that are first-seen safe, why break a system (zero-confirm TXs) that many people currently enjoy (well unless you're of the ideology that Bitcoin should only be a settlement backbone)?    

...or unless your transaction can wait for some non-trivial amount of time to confirm to the level of reliability that is necessary for it.

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

Because it can be economically expected that most transactions now are low priority, since fees are cheap. This means the actual transaction volume that likely would be taking place given only somewhat more expensive fees is much, much less. It's should be obvious enough that if transactions were completely free people would spam like crazy. That's not a judgment on the validity of those transactions; it's just economic reality. People start to economize dramatically when there is even a marginally-above-zero cost versus when there isn't.

This is in no way suggesting 1MB is sufficient, but it's not helpful to pretend that transaction volume when fees are negligible will remain the same if fees go to merely tiny. In no other market would we expect such a thing, and for all we know we could easily be talking about order-of-magnitude differences in volume from a fee increase that still presents no real pain for any major use case.

but cheap to who, you?  i remember an Indian standing up at the San Jose conf during Q&A and complaining about high tx fees for ppl in his country.  and they are, given their relative income levels.  

we should be promoting Bitcoin to these 3rd world countries where a .0001 minimum fee is arguably expensive.  that's why we have the  economic fee choice of .00001 which oftentimes still results in rejection.  to take it further, do you believe that Bitcoin should offer even these Indians the ability to buy a cup of coffee for cheap fees?  i think so but probably you think different.  i know tvbcof and iCE would flat out say no way.  but then that goes back to my argument that for maximum decentralization and to become digital gold Bitcoin needs to service these ppl.

when you say ppl will spam like crazy, don't you trust that the miners can react to filter that spam, if they so choose?  the problem with the 1MB choke approach is that yes, new users will be forced to economize on their tx's.  OR just leave.

This isn't relevant to the question of whether having a fee market would help. I'm not saying 1MB is adequate, and I'm not saying that fees shouldn't be cheap enough for any particular group. I'm saying that no matter what blocksize cap we have, or even if we have no cap, we will still need a fee market for maximum scalability on chain. And we could easily be talking about order-of-magnitude differences in scalability contingent on the presence or absence of a proper fee market. As for miners blocking spam, sure, but as you say: who's to tell what is really spam?

[tvbcof]

with RBF, does the sender have the ability to completely change the destination address back to himself?

What's your problem with that?  It's his money until it's not.

Oh, Bitcoin is not a real-time system in spite of years of propaganda trying to make it so?  How sad.  I think I'm going to cry.

Except that Bitcoin does function as a real-time system for most use cases today perfectly fine. There is an entire Bitcoin ecommerce industry that proves you wrong.

precisely.

Then why are you all fritzed out about the RBF 'attack'.  Real-time Bitcoin not so robust as you've been led to believe?

[Peter R]

I think tvbcof means to say Bitcoin wasn't ever going to be useful for point of sales. (I assume that means Bitcoin by itself.)

In the interest of not repeating old points, this is what Hearn has to say on this: https://medium.com/@octskyward/replace-by-fee-43edd9a1dd6d

Right.  I think the people pushing full-RBF are more interested in making on-chain Bitcoin transactions less useful for point-of-sales than the often-stated goal of allowing users to "unstick" stuck transactions.  Since we can "unstick" a TX in ways that are first-seen safe, why break a system (zero-confirm TXs) that many people currently enjoy (well unless you're of the ideology that Bitcoin should only be a settlement backbone)?    

...or unless your transaction can wait for some non-trivial amount of time to confirm to the level of reliability that is necessary for it.

I don't follow.  It sounds like you think it would be a good thing to make zero-confirm transactions less secure.  Is this true?

[cypherdoc]

I think tvbcof means to say Bitcoin wasn't ever going to be useful for point of sales. (I assume that means Bitcoin by itself.)

In the interest of not repeating old points, this is what Hearn has to say on this: https://medium.com/@octskyward/replace-by-fee-43edd9a1dd6d

Ah, Mr. Hearn.  Cypherdoc's giant among men.  I like Peter Todd's latest rendition which seems to be something like:  'The storm is coming but won't arrive until all non-hackers have had a fair chance to get on the lifeboats currently under construction.'

lol, your thick skull acts like i am the "only" one out there arguing this.  there is a whole legion of Bitcoin merchants, including Coinbase, out there who are making the exact same argument.  in fact, RBF is a non starter even for the core devs.  Todd is the only one pushing this.

lol.

[cypherdoc]

blocks full again with TPS unacceptably high --> unconf tx set ~ 3000, more than double normal.  pools taking defensive action.  when will Blockstream devs do something?:

Why do you call this "defensive" action?

when Chinese pools face a series of what they consider to be "large blocks", which in this case means full blocks as you can see from the data, they automatically switch to mining "header" blocks with 0 tx's during the time it takes to process all the tx's in the preceding large block.  this is b/c large blocks take a bit more time to process and check all the signatures so the argument goes that they can't afford to waste that precious time so for defensive purposed they just go ahead and start hashing  the next block with only the  "header" that in this case contain no tx's that might have included an invalid input from the preceding large block.

How about: When they see a new block, they immediately start mining based on that, with an empty transaction list. When they have removed the transactions in the last block from their own list of transactions to include, they mine with the new list. If a block is found quickly, it will be the empty block, else it will be a block with the new list.

You can see that the zero transaction blocks always come a short time after the previous. But they should not need minutes to establish a new list, so I am not sure.

Maybe some miner can chime in and say what really is going on.

your first paragraph was correct.

i'm not sure why the 0 tx blocks come so fast after the previous block.  i keep asking this.

it's the sigop checking of a large block, i believe, that takes the extra time.

Well my first paragraph suggested a reason. They need time to construct a new transaction list. When that is done, new transactions can more easily be added. The first list is the time consuming part.

Edit: The block finding is completely random. It is just as probable to find a block the first second, as after several minutes.

i know the probability is random.  so why has every_single_one i've seen always been within a minute or two?

[justusranvier]

As far as I can tell, the only "benefit" is that it breaks zero-confirm transactions and, like sticking with the 1 MB limit, provides impetus to use off-chain solutions.  

Yes.

[cypherdoc]

with RBF, does the sender have the ability to completely change the destination address back to himself?

What's your problem with that?  It's his money until it's not.

Oh, Bitcoin is not a real-time system in spite of years of propaganda trying to make it so?  How sad.  I think I'm going to cry.

Except that Bitcoin does function as a real-time system for most use cases today perfectly fine. There is an entire Bitcoin ecommerce industry that proves you wrong.

precisely.

Then why are you all fritzed out about the RBF 'attack'.  Real-time Bitcoin not so robust as you've been led to believe?

lol, why do you even Bitcoin?  you're such a pessimist.  your father must have beat you.

fritzed out?  where do you even get that?  the pt is, that MANY ppl already agree on, is that RBF is not safe b/c it allows reversal of tx's in an already established industry where it has been proven not to be a problem.  it tries to fix something that is not there. 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

i know the probability is random.  so why has every_single_one i've seen always been within a minute or two?

And is it just me, or does it seem like people keep remarking on the coincidental "pathological inability to find blocks" during each of the stress tests? (this is from memory, could be wrong)

Might it have something to do with how mining pools work, perhaps a bug or inefficiency that causes them to throw away or waste hashing power if they are busy collecting too many transactions, lowering the overall effective hashrate significantly? (And conversely the 0 tx blocks are using their real full hashrate??)

/no-idea-about-this-technical-aspect

[tvbcof]

I think tvbcof means to say Bitcoin wasn't ever going to be useful for point of sales. (I assume that means Bitcoin by itself.)

In the interest of not repeating old points, this is what Hearn has to say on this: https://medium.com/@octskyward/replace-by-fee-43edd9a1dd6d

Right.  I think the people pushing full-RBF are more interested in making on-chain Bitcoin transactions less useful for point-of-sales than the often-stated goal of allowing users to "unstick" stuck transactions.  Since we can "unstick" a TX in ways that are first-seen safe, why break a system (zero-confirm TXs) that many people currently enjoy (well unless you're of the ideology that Bitcoin should only be a settlement backbone)?    

...or unless your transaction can wait for some non-trivial amount of time to confirm to the level of reliability that is necessary for it.

I don't follow.  It sounds like you think it would be a good thing to make zero-confirm transactions less secure.  Is this true?

Totally true.  In my opinion they are simply incompatible with the design of Bitcoin when Bitcoin is being used as a reliable system as I would like it to be.  ('reliable' has some technical meanings in computer science BTW.  e.g., 'reliable signals' in OS design.)  Efforts to make it otherwise are effectively pounding a square peg into a round hole and result in wasted energy, splinters and breakage.  Also completely unnecessary and counterproductive when 2-way-peg and some of the other technology that Blockstream is working on result in sidechains being a nearly perfect proxy for native Bitcoin.

So, to counter justusravenier's answer in the new post I noticed before posting this: 'No.'

[Odalv]

I think tvbcof means to say Bitcoin wasn't ever going to be useful for point of sales. (I assume that means Bitcoin by itself.)

In the interest of not repeating old points, this is what Hearn has to say on this: https://medium.com/@octskyward/replace-by-fee-43edd9a1dd6d

Right.  I think the people pushing full-RBF are more interested in making on-chain Bitcoin transactions less useful for point-of-sales than the often-stated goal of allowing users to "unstick" stuck transactions.  Since we can "unstick" a TX in ways that are first-seen safe, why break a system (zero-confirm TXs) that many people currently enjoy (well unless you're of the ideology that Bitcoin should only be a settlement backbone)?    

...or unless your transaction can wait for some non-trivial amount of time to confirm to the level of reliability that is necessary for it.

I don't follow.  It sounds like you think it would be a good thing to make zero-confirm transactions less secure.  Is this true?

Zero-confirm transactions are totally insecure. Use it only if you are a gambling company.

[cypherdoc]

As far as I can tell, the only "benefit" is that it breaks zero-confirm transactions and, like sticking with the 1 MB limit, provides impetus to use off-chain solutions.  

Yes.

tvbcof doesn't get it.