Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[JorgeStolfi]

Given the cost, you can't mine empty blocks for long even though the blockchain can support empty blocks and will support the longest chain
That type of attack you describe would be prohibitive in terms of cost

I understood that empty blocks do not cost more to mine than normal blocks, and pay the 25 BTC reward just like them.  Isn't this true?  (Transaction fees are still negligible -- less than 20 BTC/day, compared to 3600 BTC/day for rewards.)

According to the script I described, the cartel does not need to increase its hashing power during the transition, and does not
lose the block rewards, whether it succeeds or fails in the attempt.

[jamming of the main chain] doesn't invalidate past transactions or future ones or constitute a change to the protocol supported by the p2p nodes. Transactions resume after the attack.

Users who do not upgrade will have their bitcoins blocked for as long as the cartel wants to.  Meanwhile, users who upgrade early will not even notice the transition, and those who upgrade after the deadline will immediately recover access to their coins.

if successful it would render Bitcoin useless

Why? Objectively, it would be as if Satoshi himself had written "2018" instead of "2016" in the reward halving schedule.

Do you mean that it would show that the protocol is not resistant to change, as many believe?  But, unless there is a flaw that I still can't see, the plan could succeed.  So bitcoin is already useless?

given the cost to participate un-cooperatively, any actor would stand to gain more by cooperating.

Exactly.

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[JorgeStolfi]

Assuming the bet was for a non-trivial amount, it would suggest that you actually believed the claims you're making.  Like the PoW miners, you'd be putting your resources at risk.   [ ... ] according to your logic, is almost guaranteed to occur (that the block reward halving wouldn't happen. [ ... ]
Smooth then offered you a chance to wager on .  You made excuses and declined. 

I am not predicting that the next halving will be postponed.  That plan I described is an example of how a 51% cartel can force a change of protocol, presented in response to claims that a 51% "attack" cannot do that.

A similar plan could be used tomorrow by the top 4 miners to, say, reverse the last halving and restore the reward to 50 BTC/block.  (But of course this change would cause a lot more commotion.  By 2016 people hopefully will have accepted the fact that the miners do rule the network.  )

You presented your theories (and called them facts).  Many people provided counter arguments as to why it won't play out the way you imagined. You disagreed.  

Well, I described a plan for a protocol-change "attack" and pointed out the options, incentives, and risks that each player would have.  Some people expressed their beliefs about how the players would react to a different attack (and called them facts).  I disagreed.

[JorgeStolfi]

It will fail because the community will press what Adam calls the Big Red Button and hard fork.

(I don't recall whether I replied to that here or on reddit.)  The "Red Button" solution is the third option that, in my summary above, each user would have: upgrade to a different protocol that the cartel miners cannot mine.

That option is a suicide only for the rebel users, since all the miners, whether they like the change or not, would be forced to abandon the rebels and join the cartel ranks.  The rebel users would then find themselves in a new altcoin, with a fourth blockchain (4)  that wuld not use the bitcoin protocol, supported by a minuscule CPU/GPU mining network.  Their rebelBTCs would not be accepted by users or services who converted, and they would not be able to receive cartelBTCs from them.  

Your cartel will lose the transaction fees they didn't earn when rejecting transactions on the original chain. They will also lose the value of the mining gear (and other brand value associated with their mining businesses). I doubt the community would go so far as to hard fork retroactively (eliminating the mining rewards from the empty attack blocks), but that is also possible, so its a risk the cartel would face.

Unless I missed something, in the plan that I outlined the cartel will earn both cartelBTC and rebelBTC rewards throughout the transition.  Depending on the outcome of the attack they will lose one of the two, but the other is still double what they would earn by fair play.

The rebels could try to take revenge from the cartel by stealing their rewards, but they could do that only in the rebel altcoin.

You don't have to believe that individual end users would be behind this (I argue they will simple update their software from whatever its original source, which in no case of which I'm aware includes miners), but that the rest of bitcoin industry -- coinbase, bitpay, venture capital firms, hedge funds, etc. -- certainly would support it. They have nothing to gain and everything to lose from ceding power over the network to miners.

The bitcoin industry will surely choose the fork that is expected to have most users.   The cartel fork will have all the miners and 500 PH/s (say) of hash power.  Rebel users will be unable to use the network for days until they upgrade to the red button version; while users who give in to the cartel will not suffer any inconvenience.  The design of the economic game part of the protocol has always assumed that the players are greedy and will choose their behavior so as to maximize their immediate gain; but that would make them switch immediately to the cartel version.  The network has always been controlled by the miners, only that now the power is concentrated in half a dozen companies.  

[JorgeStolfi]

You see, if power was distributed over many thousands of independent miners, all such lists would have thousads names

This statement is logically false.

I forgot the word 'evenly' before 'distributed'.   (I used it elsewhere when saying that same condition.)
Is that why you did not understand the logic?

[cbeast]

Please stop feeding the troll. All as in 100% of his arguments have been debunked or already have solutions planned. He is very good at using fallacious arguments. Don't play into them. They are easy to spot because they have few details. If you challenge them, he doesn't answer you directly, instead he plays another trick.

[LiQio]

Please stop feeding the troll. All as in 100% of his arguments have been debunked or already have solutions planned. He is very good at using fallacious arguments. Don't play into them. They are easy to spot because they have few details. If you challenge them, he doesn't answer you directly, instead he plays another trick.

Without taking sides: A Q&A or matrix or whatever for each argument (and counter-argument) would help the undecided.
Any source available?

[cbeast]

Please stop feeding the troll. All as in 100% of his arguments have been debunked or already have solutions planned. He is very good at using fallacious arguments. Don't play into them. They are easy to spot because they have few details. If you challenge them, he doesn't answer you directly, instead he plays another trick.

Without taking sides: A Q&A or matrix or whatever for each argument (and counter-argument) would help the undecided.
Any source available?

I'll let you pick one and I'll point out the fallacy and google the discussion if necessary.

[smooth]

You see, if power was distributed over many thousands of independent miners, all such lists would have thousads names

This statement is logically false.

I forgot the word 'evenly' before 'distributed'.   (I used it elsewhere when saying that same condition.)
Is that why you did not understand the logic?

I did understand the so called logic, but it was false.

It is false because it assumes all such lists are showing power, but in fact they all show something else, generally pools. I've never seen a "mining power list," have you?

Even with a relatively small number of pools you can still have power distributed over many thousands (or even more) independent miners, because those miners are able to move their hash rate. No pool can be confident of maintaining a given share because hash power can shift and new pools can be created.

In fact this was not the case with ghash since much of their mining was their own equipment.

[bassclef]

I'm still waiting for an answer on my bet.

I don't bet money if I can avoid it.  (That is one of the reasons why I do not own bitcoins.)

Talk is cheap.

Keep on trollin.

I for one would like to see Jorge put some money where his (big) mouth is.

[cbeast]

You see, if power was distributed over many thousands of independent miners, all such lists would have thousads names

This statement is logically false.

I forgot the word 'evenly' before 'distributed'.   (I used it elsewhere when saying that same condition.)
Is that why you did not understand the logic?

I did understand the so called logic, but it was false.

It is false because it assumes all such lists are showing power, but in fact they all show something else, generally pools. I've never seen a "mining power list," have you?

Even with a relatively small number of pools you can still have power distributed over many thousands (or even more) independent miners, because those miners are able to move their hash rate. No pool can be confident of maintaining a given share because hash power can shift and new pools can be created.

In fact this was not the case with ghash since much of their mining was their own equipment.

You presume ghash miners are used on it's own pool. It's a fair assumption, but it might behoove ghash to make a deal with other pools for no fee mining in the interest of decentralization.

[LiQio]

Please stop feeding the troll. All as in 100% of his arguments have been debunked or already have solutions planned. He is very good at using fallacious arguments. Don't play into them. They are easy to spot because they have few details. If you challenge them, he doesn't answer you directly, instead he plays another trick.

Without taking sides: A Q&A or matrix or whatever for each argument (and counter-argument) would help the undecided.
Any source available?

I'll let you pick one and I'll point out the fallacy and google the discussion if necessary.

Appreciated, outahere - but IMO that would not really solve the problem, that ATM every post seems like "cherry-picking" to (back)troll.
But since a lot of posters in this discussion seem to have an "academic background" a more reasonable "container" would make a lot of sense (again IMO)...

[NewLiberty]

You see, if power was distributed over many thousands of independent miners, all such lists would have thousads names

This statement is logically false.

I forgot the word 'evenly' before 'distributed'.   (I used it elsewhere when saying that same condition.)
Is that why you did not understand the logic?

I did understand the so called logic, but it was false.

It is false because it assumes all such lists are showing power, but in fact they all show something else, generally pools. I've never seen a "mining power list," have you?

Even with a relatively small number of pools you can still have power distributed over many thousands (or even more) independent miners, because those miners are able to move their hash rate. No pool can be confident of maintaining a given share because hash power can shift and new pools can be created.

In fact this was not the case with ghash since much of their mining was their own equipment.

You presume ghash miners are used on it's own pool. It's a fair assumption, but it might behoove ghash to make a deal with other pools for no fee mining in the interest of decentralization.

True its a poor assumption because ghash.io miners are in fact split between several pools.  
This is a different layer of centralization (they can suddenly move them to their own pool, for example).

I mentioned a few of the layers of centralization in my previous post.
-ASIC makers
-Miners
-Pools
-Devs
Each of these are too centralized by some measures.  (the world of bitcoin is still kinda small).

The silly thing that Jorge does is assume that not only will these all perpetually get worse (instead by most evidence they are trending toward better), but that it will be fatal and are fated to be so.  There is not any evidence for his assumption, it appears to simply be prejudicial.  He started here with it and it may be his job to perpetuate it since he does work for the State.

[smooth]

The rebel users would then find themselves in a new altcoin, with a fourth blockchain (4)  that wuld not use the bitcoin protocol, supported by a minuscule CPU/GPU mining network.  Their rebelBTCs would not be accepted by users or services who converted, and they would not be able to receive cartelBTCs from them.   

Your rhetoric is still ridiculous. Users upgrading to the next version of software from where they got it in the first place does not make them "rebels."

This is the part you don't seem to understand. "Bitcoin" is not a static protocol that Satoshi wrote down in a paper six years ago. "Bitcoin" is what the community decides it is. For example, Satoshi's paper does not include a 1 MB block limit, yet that is very much a part of "Bitcoin" today. There are countless other elements of the system that exist in the form they exist today because of specific software that its users choose. Bitcoin tomorrow will likewise in all probability be something different (if there is ever another hard fork; opinions differ but my guess is there will be).

As for the "minuscule CPU/GPU mining network," you are horribly confused about how mining works. A gazillion hashes/second doesn't make the network secure and in fact the number of hashes is completely irrelevant. What matters for the most part is the amount of electricity used and secondarily the cost of the mining equipment. For example 100 watts buys you something on the order of 200 GH/sec of SHA256D. The same 100 watts would buy you perhaps 300 hashes/sec of (to pick one with which I happen to be familiar) CryptoNight. These are approximately equal in value for mining; 200 GH/sec of one algorithm is not 2/3 of a billion times "more secure" than 300 H/s of another. These units are incomparable.

The current bitcoin network is about 150 megawatts. That's something on the order of a 1-2 million PCs using a CPU algorithm. At least until specialized hardware and mining farms developed, a bitcoin forked to a CPU/GPU algorithm would look a lot like a million bitcoin users all mining on their computers. Sounds pretty darn secure to me.

The rebels could try to take revenge from the cartel by stealing their rewards, but they could do that only in the rebel altcoin.

Again, the rhetoric is absurd. An upgraded version of bitcoin with a hard fork (it wouldn't be the first), used by the majority of bitcoin users, is not an altcoin, it is bitcoin. The users adopting it are not rebels, they are bitcoin users.

Rebel users will be unable to use the network for days until they upgrade to the red button version; while users who give in to the cartel will not suffer any inconvenience.

In your scenario, the cartel has announced its plan in advance and distributed its hard fork version to all the users. The rest of the community can do likewise. There need be no interruption.

Furthermore, under this wartime scenario transactions would likely voluntarily halt anyway, because no one could be sure that the original chain being jammed wouldn't turn out to be the surviving chain, so no one would accept payments that weren't mined on it. That would certainly be an inconvenience and damaging to bitcoin generally, but the cartel would have no advantage absent some ability to guarantee that their fork would succeed, which they can't do.

[cbeast]

Please stop feeding the troll. All as in 100% of his arguments have been debunked or already have solutions planned. He is very good at using fallacious arguments. Don't play into them. They are easy to spot because they have few details. If you challenge them, he doesn't answer you directly, instead he plays another trick.

Without taking sides: A Q&A or matrix or whatever for each argument (and counter-argument) would help the undecided.
Any source available?

I'll let you pick one and I'll point out the fallacy and google the discussion if necessary.

Appreciated, outahere - but IMO that would not really solve the problem, that ATM every post seems like "cherry-picking" to (back)troll.
But since a lot of posters in this discussion seem to have an "academic background" a more reasonable "container" would make a lot of sense (again IMO)...

I call that container Google. There is a Google search bar on this forum.

[LiQio]

Please stop feeding the troll. All as in 100% of his arguments have been debunked or already have solutions planned. He is very good at using fallacious arguments. Don't play into them. They are easy to spot because they have few details. If you challenge them, he doesn't answer you directly, instead he plays another trick.

Without taking sides: A Q&A or matrix or whatever for each argument (and counter-argument) would help the undecided.
Any source available?

I'll let you pick one and I'll point out the fallacy and google the discussion if necessary.

Appreciated, outahere - but IMO that would not really solve the problem, that ATM every post seems like "cherry-picking" to (back)troll.
But since a lot of posters in this discussion seem to have an "academic background" a more reasonable "container" would make a lot of sense (again IMO)...

I call that container Google. There is a Google search bar on this forum.

  Nevermind.
Back to popcorn and watching trolls.

[cbeast]

Please stop feeding the troll. All as in 100% of his arguments have been debunked or already have solutions planned. He is very good at using fallacious arguments. Don't play into them. They are easy to spot because they have few details. If you challenge them, he doesn't answer you directly, instead he plays another trick.

Without taking sides: A Q&A or matrix or whatever for each argument (and counter-argument) would help the undecided.
Any source available?

I'll let you pick one and I'll point out the fallacy and google the discussion if necessary.

Appreciated, outahere - but IMO that would not really solve the problem, that ATM every post seems like "cherry-picking" to (back)troll.
But since a lot of posters in this discussion seem to have an "academic background" a more reasonable "container" would make a lot of sense (again IMO)...

I call that container Google. There is a Google search bar on this forum.

  Nevermind.
Back to popcorn and watching trolls.

That's why I'm saying you need TrollDAR™ to spot the fallacies before the contagion spreads. Enjoy your popcorn.

[sickpig]

Please stop feeding the troll. All as in 100% of his arguments have been debunked or already have solutions planned. He is very good at using fallacious arguments. Don't play into them. They are easy to spot because they have few details. If you challenge them, he doesn't answer you directly, instead he plays another trick.

+1

Please note how he started to post on this thread a few days ago (asking questions about sidechains)
and then he slowly started to broaden the scope of his questions to bitcoin fundamentals and increase posts frequency.

Each of is post contains valid reasoning and seems legit, you have to take a step back to see what I think is his real agenda.

Looking at JorgeStolfi account activity by time I wonder even if it is used by more then one person:



Having said that I think the best course of action is leaving him (them?) alone, IMHO.  

[JorgeStolfi]

Please stop feeding the troll. All as in 100% of his arguments have been debunked or already have solutions planned. He is very good at using fallacious arguments. Don't play into them. They are easy to spot because they have few details. If you challenge them, he doesn't answer you directly, instead he plays another trick.

Please note how he started to post on this thread a few days ago (asking questions about sidechains)
and then he slowly started to broaden the scope of his questions to bitcoin fundamentals and increase posts frequency.

Yes, I was trying to understand what the SC proposal was all about.  Seems it is the fable of the elephant and the blind men, so I gave up on that for now.  But the motivation, at least for some people, seems to be a way to save bitcoin from some risk.  The discussion went into 51% attack, so I posted my understanding about that.  I did not see any technical objections to what I wrote, only different beliefs about how the community would react.  Well, each one is entitled to their opinion on that.

Each of is post contains valid reasoning and seems legit

Oh, thank you.

Looking at JorgeStolfi account activity by time I wonder even if it is used by more then one person:

Well, I am 64, I am not a Beatles' song, I do not have regular hours, it is school vacations, and I have a big pile of exams to grade.  And I noticed that someone was wrong on the internet.

Having said that I think the best course of action is leaving them alone, IMHO.  

I would appreciate that, thank you.  

[Come-from-Beyond]

Having said that I think the best course of action is leaving him (them?) alone, IMHO.  

You are a typical bitcoiner, sir. You guys always go to personality level when run out of counterarguments.

[cypherdoc]

Bitfinex continuing to drag everyone up.  Don't hesitate.