Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[tvbcof]

...since 9/11 was clearly not a attributable to handful of Muslims hiding out in caves half way around the world...

Seriously? Conspiracy theories are fun and all, but most require there to exist a level of perfection in coordination, execution, and secrecy in large organizations, or spanning far more individuals, than is rational to consider a real possibility.

No they don't.  That's why most of these false flags are about as clear as the nose on one's face when someone takes the time to look into them.  Thankfully we have an alternate media and interested individuals in society who, for whatever their set of reasons, will do just that.  We'll see how much longer that lasts now that the FCC has regulatory authority over the internet.  I'm guessing that they'll hold up about as well as Bitcoin when people attempt to use it in it's original P2P form.

Question: has anyone done a single interview with any of the workmen seen working in the elevator shafts of the twin towers in the weeks leading up to 9/11? Not that it would disprove the claims of truthers, but its non-existence is stark.

Before someone can conclude the impossible, I think they should at least refute those reports and/or produce an interview with one of those workmen.

I suppose Melbustus thinks the CIA doesn't have more than 1 or 2 agents sworn to lifetime secrecy under the threat of assassination should they violate the (perhaps unwritten) terms of their servitude. Just because we have a few cases of those who claim be ex-agents coming forward (not necessarily on the 9/11 issue), does not preclude the existence of different levels of secrecy clearances and ramifications for violating them.

I mean seriously grown men. We have a DEEP STATE with $trillions of funding taken from the unaccounted for DoD budget (per the former DoD secretary Donald Rumsfeld on the eve of 9/11 on national TV and other sources hence), and they can't secure the lifetime services a few good men  

I wonder what sense of reality sheep like Melbustus and iCebreaker live in  

I remember one interview with an IT guy.  On 9/11 he was taking a comp day.  A weekend or two before the power had been mysteriously cut to his server room in one of the twin towers and he had spent some of his time bringing the machines back on-line.

He said that in the preceding weeks there was a noticeable amount of dust on the vents bringing air into the building.  I think it was he but am not sure who said that several weeks earlier the explosive sniffing dogs were removed from the lobby and also that on one of the vacant floors which he was near there was rumbling noises like large carts being moved around.  He imagined those things that construction debris are put in.

As with most such interviews I took the time to dig up, the person seemed to be quite credible.  Almost without exception these people who relate information or do work on the story claim that they only came forward because they don't wish to live in a society where the government makes policy based on false flag events and they hope their information will open people's eyes and change the course of our society for the better.  I can relate to this because if I were in such a situation that would be a motivating factor for me.  Conversely, I can really see no reason to invent or lie about such things.  Certainly nobody wins any popularity contests by being 'conspiracy theorists.'

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[TPTB_need_war]

but also way more expensive for Bitcoin's growth prospects as new users get turned away or fed up.  Cripplecoin, in the long run, fails to the benefit of Blockstreams SC project.

you keep ignoring the fact that miners can filter spam; if they want.

Miners can't filter spam without also filtering valid transactions, because they are indistinguishable.

Users will not get turned away, because where there is a demand, innovators will spring to life to supply it—a.k.a. a free market—your jealously of innovators notwithstanding.

[smooth]

but also way more expensive for Bitcoin's growth prospects as new users get turned away or fed up.  Cripplecoin, in the long run, fails to the benefit of Blockstreams SC project.

you keep ignoring the fact that miners can filter spam; if they want.

Miners can't filter spam without also filtering valid transactions, because they are indistinguishable.

I don't really agree because spam is so much in the eye of the beholder. The only objective definition of spam is transactions paying a low fee and that can (and will) be filtered.

[TPTB_need_war]

but also way more expensive for Bitcoin's growth prospects as new users get turned away or fed up.  Cripplecoin, in the long run, fails to the benefit of Blockstreams SC project.

you keep ignoring the fact that miners can filter spam; if they want.

Miners can't filter spam without also filtering valid transactions, because they are indistinguishable.

I don't really agree because spam is so much in the eye of the beholder. The only objective definition of spam is transactions paying a low fee and that can (and will) be filtered.

That is my point too.

[smooth]

absolutely.  look here.  guys reporting their bitcoind shut down from memory overload.  that sucks:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3bmb5r/stress_test_in_full_effect/csniofb

A design which forces every consensus making node to approve every transaction is stoopid. Any half brained engineer could realize this if they spent some time thinking about the issues.

It is, only if and when another design that accomplishes decentralized consensus without that requirement is published and peer reviewed.

[cypherdoc]

but also way more expensive for Bitcoin's growth prospects as new users get turned away or fed up.  Cripplecoin, in the long run, fails to the benefit of Blockstreams SC project.

you keep ignoring the fact that miners can filter spam; if they want.

Miners can't filter spam without also filtering valid transactions, because they are indistinguishable.

I don't really agree because spam is so much in the eye of the beholder. The only objective definition of spam is transactions paying a low fee and that can (and will) be filtered.

some of the spam going on now is trying to use 0 fee, which is filtered by just about all miners.

[TPTB_need_war]

you being a socialist, of course you come up with these bizarre conclusions that disadvantage the masses.

the ideal situation would be that there is NO LIMIT.

The Socialist is the one who tells us we can have everything we want for free. How has that worked out for Western civilization with socialism peaking every where with the sovereign debt collapses imminent with $200+ trillion of global debt.

some of the spam going on now is trying to use 0 fee, which is filtered by just about all miners.

And you want an unlimited block size  

Now let's say I like to attack the network and I pay someone with a lot of hashrate to flood the network with blocks of unlimited size with 0 fee txns.

It is sorely obvious that you have inadequate skills in computer science and game theory.

[smooth]

Now let's say I like to attack the network and I pay someone with a lot of hashrate to flood the network with blocks of unlimited size with 0 fee txns.

It's not zero fee if you are paying.

[TPTB_need_war]

Now let's say I like to attack the network and I pay someone with a lot of hashrate to flood the network with blocks of unlimited size with 0 fee txns.

It's not zero fee if you are paying.

I was going to comment about that, but I decided to see who wouldn't figure it out for themselves.

What is the distinction between the two? There is one.

[iCEBREAKER]

This is about right

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3bka9i/upetertodd_is_trying_to_get_full_replacebyfee/csmxi6i

Peter Todd on /r/buttcoin today:

Why doesnt buttcoin start its own "stress test"?

I dont know anything about coding or servers or the intricate workings of bitcoin, (I'm just an ideas man), but it would be fun to be involved in setting up our own little "stress test" on the bitcoin network.
Obviously it's a waste of money, but so are a lot of things (at least it goes to the nice energy companies in China). (...)

Find me $5k and I'll make it happen in a big way, with proper tx creation scripts that don't just crash.
This is a serious offer.

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/3bk12f/why_doesnt_buttcoin_start_its_own_stress_test/csn4nbz

 

I think this demonstrates his level of hypocrisy here.

Peter is saying to the /r/buttcoin group that he is happy to implement a massive flood attack against Bitcoin for $5K in transactions (which is enough to generate 10s of millions of transactions very quickly), because he is confident that the network can handle this.

Which leads one to ask, if nodes the and current P2P network can handle a flood of several 10s of millions of transactions (as Peter is saying), why can't Bitcoin handle larger blocksizes again?

Handling larger blocks is fundamentally different than handling full blocks (which you dramatized as "a massive flood attack").

[justusranvier]

One of the things that's missing from the block size debate is a usable threat model that would allow us to make objective and rational risk assessments of the various threats loosely defined as "centralization".

Before we know how worried we should be about larger blocks (potentially) reducing the number of nodes, we need to know exactly how an attacker benefits from this situation and what kinds of mitigating factors and/or countermeasures are applicable to each attack.

I haven't heard any kind of analysis along those lines yet.

[thezerg]

Ever hear of Edward Snowden?  Do you know what it means when someone in the 5-eyes says that they 'own the internet?'

As an infrastructure the global internet is no where nearly as robust as most people imagine.  It can be much better, but there is little incentive and this is no accident.  Most people cannot fathom designing in any other way but to maximize the capabilities granted by the owners of this resource and are dimly aware, if at all, how tenuous some of the capabilities are.

My sensibilities as an engineer and system designer had been to design for the worst plausible scenarios.  In a great many cases this resulted in some wasted effort and some limitations.  In a minority of cases it turned out that some of the worst fears were realized and my systems continued to perform to design.  These minority of cases outweighed the majority by a mile.  Part of the reason for this is that the super-systems did not become reliant on capabilities which the sub-systems were unable to deliver.

actually, i have.  and he is precisely one of the reasons i think we're winning.

the NSA and 5 Eyes, i believe, are going to lose in the long run precisely b/c Snowden's leak shows they can't secure data.  everyone knows this now which is why Google and Apple have started encrypting as default, much to the chagrin of the gvt.  and this is happening all over the internet.

furthermore, with 21 Inc on the verge of releasing mini Asic chips that power devices, the chances for mass decentralization of Bitcoin goes up.  also, the Internet has never had it's own monetary system or means of conveniently and cheaply paying one another in realtime.  Bitcoin, for the first time in history, can provide that.

OK, let's try again.  Ever heard of 'packet filtering?'

If you are the engineer you claim to be you know damn well how easy it would be to hide Bitcoin txns from a DPI DSP engine inside a HTTP image request, an audio or video stream, or of course via an encrypted connection.

Please don't post arguments that you know are illogical but you think will convince others.  It does not further the discourse.

[thezerg]

One of the things that's missing from the block size debate is a usable threat model that would allow us to make objective and rational risk assessments of the various threats loosely defined as "centralization".

Before we know how worried we should be about larger blocks (potentially) reducing the number of nodes, we need to know exactly how an attacker benefits from this situation and what kinds of mitigating factors and/or countermeasures are applicable to each attack.

I haven't heard any kind of analysis along those lines yet.

Yes, excellent point.  Because there is not much AFAIK.  Really, the power is in the hands of the miners (mining pool operators), which is already ironically very centralized relative to nodes.  Off the top of my head, fewer nodes would make it easier mount a Sybil attack to isolate a node or SPV client and then feed it incorrect data.

[Peter R]

Sort of cute:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3bpese/blocking_the_stream_the_blocksize_limit_debate_in/

[justusranvier]

Here are some attacks which are affected by the number of nodes and/or miners and/or hashrate:

Attacker: Miners
Attack: Double spending. A miner can spend bitcoins on a product or service, then produce a block which invalidates the spend
Probability of success: 100% when the hash rate of the attacker exceeds the hash rate of the rest of the network
Severity: Number of bitcoins controlled by the attacker * number of attacks performed

Attacker: Miners
Attack: Denial of service. A miner can engage in selective censorship of transactions
Probability of success: 100% when the hash rate of the attacker exceeds the hash rate of the rest of the network
Severity: % success rate of censor identifying transactions they wish to block * value of the blocked transactions

Attacker: Nodes
Attack: Double spending. An attacker can defraud a target who is using an SPV wallet by providing them with invalid block headers which allow the attacker to pay the target with a transaction which references non-existant inputs
Probability of success: 0% unless the attacker can prevent the target from communicating with any honest nodes
Severity:  Number of bitcoins controlled by the attacker * number of attacks performed

[TPTB_need_war]

The only technically knowledgeable people who support this inane system design do so because they see clearly that it will consolidate the infrastructure into a form that is as easily controlled as fiat money is currently.  To many many people, this consolidation of control is a good thing.  Most people love Big Brother whether they realize it or not and have the reflexes trained to support him.

this is precisely why we disagree on everything.  i believe that the internet can allow the ppl to take back control of their money as it should be.  don't forget that central banks are still a relatively new concept in the modern age.  with that, i mean, going back 100 yrs or so.  

maybe it's naive, maybe not.  but it certainly is worth the effort and risk to try.  which is why i support lifting the block limit just to see what happens.  i believe we will cope.

Ever hear of Edward Snowden?  

actually, i have.  and he is precisely one of the reasons i think we're winning.

the NSA and 5 Eyes, i believe, are going to lose in the long run precisely b/c Snowden's leak shows they can't secure data.  everyone knows this now which is why Google and Apple have started encrypting as default, much to the chagrin of the gvt.  and this is happening all over the internet.

furthermore, with 21 Inc on the verge of releasing mini Asic chips that power devices, the chances for mass decentralization of Bitcoin goes up.  also, the Internet has never had it's own monetary system or means of conveniently and cheaply paying one another in realtime.  Bitcoin, for the first time in history, can provide that.

You apparently lack an economics education on the concept of an undersupplied public good, i.e. free-of-speech doesn't guarantee that participants will act unselfishly to avert catastrophic outcomes.

[tvbcof]

OK, let's try again.  Ever heard of 'packet filtering?'

If you are the engineer you claim to be you know damn well how easy it would be to hide Bitcoin txns from a DPI DSP engine inside a HTTP image request, an audio or video stream, or of course via an encrypted connection.

Please don't post arguments that you know are illogical but you think will convince others.  It does not further the discourse.

In my experiments with steganography many years ago, I find it cuts down available bandwidth by orders of magnitude.  At that time it was unclear if it was even theoretically possible to hide things fully, although it was pretty clear that one could cause the waste of huge amounts of an attacker's CPU if you made him look.

The utility I used most was 'steghide'.  A while ago I looked it up again.  The source code was still available but it had not been changed in years.  In looking just now I notice that there is a French version of wikipedia which has an entry but I can find no English one and Google translate doesn't work on it.  Weird.  https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steghide

Actually, there is a point to be made that individual transactions could be hidden steganographically for spends no matter what the network transaction rate and it is kind of questionable whether the backbone itself could run fully steganographically hidden even with 1MB blocks under dedicated attack by funded and motivated attackers (who own the network.)

Ideally I'd like to see it practical for the backbone network to be operation fully on side-channels which make no use of the global internet at all.  In any real attack situation it is very unlikely that any infrastructure operator would enjoy the streaming class of network traffic that we know today.  That is another reason I would like to avoid developing a reliance on real-time behavior (or even ~10 min/conf expectations) or structured block formations and so on.  The Blockstream folks making mention of expectations in the days range gives me hope that they are designing for worst-case scenarios (which is exactly what I need to feel comfortable about storing significant value in Bitcoin.)

Edit:  BTW, I've got very little expectation that encrypted connections without government backdoors will survive indefinitely.  No design that I trust for longer duration work will make that expectation.

[TPTB_need_war]

Sort of cute:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3bpese/blocking_the_stream_the_blocksize_limit_debate_in/

Here is the rebuttal in one image.


            /\  <------- privileged members of the TPTB that control the centralized public good
~~~~~~~~~~/    \~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~> water level globally
        /        \
      /            \             so much "spam" down here, choking off the entropy of miners
    /                \
  /       TPTB         \             everybody else down here transacting perhaps,
/                        \           but fully submerged in totalitarianism

[cypherdoc]

Here are some attacks which are affected by the number of nodes and/or miners and/or hashrate:

Attacker: Miners
Attack: Double spending. A miner can spend bitcoins on a product or service, then produce a block which invalidates the spend
Probability of success: 100% when the hash rate of the attacker exceeds the hash rate of the rest of the network
Severity: Number of bitcoins controlled by the attacker * number of attacks performed

Attacker: Miners
Attack: Denial of service. A miner can engage in selective censorship of transactions
Probability of success: 100% when the hash rate of the attacker exceeds the hash rate of the rest of the network
Severity: % success rate of censor identifying transactions they wish to block * value of the blocked transactions

Attacker: Nodes
Attack: Double spending. An attacker can defraud a target who is using an SPV wallet by providing them with invalid block headers which allow the attacker to pay the target with a transaction which references non-existant inputs
Probability of success: 0% unless the attacker can prevent the target from communicating with any honest nodes
Severity:  Number of bitcoins controlled by the attacker * number of attacks performed

How about this one:

Current situation where blocks are getting full from artificial 1MB cap:
Attacker: large miners like f2pool
Attack: spam network from one of its wallets to another. Drive up overall fees of regular users.
Success: 100%

[TPTB_need_war]

How about this one:

Current situation where blocks are getting full from artificial 1MB cap:
Attacker: large miners like f2pool
Attack: spam network from one of its wallets to another. Drive up overall fees of regular users.
Success: 100%

Sustainable for only until the cumulative the fees equals their net worth, i.e. unsustainable.