Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[phoenix1]

Good morning!!

Would any of you guys care to comment on these two articles that assert that :

1) We are already hitting the 1MB block limit "an average of more than four times per day so far in 2015"

and

2) The 'real' speed of the Bitcoin network is only 2.8 TPS - "largely a result of increasingly complex transactions, often using multiple inputs and outputs"

https://tradeblock.com/blog/bitcoin-network-capacity-analysis-part-1-macro-block-trends

https://tradeblock.com/blog/bitcoin-network-capacity-analysis-part-2-macro-transaction-trends

Thanks!

[1713983054]

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[Cconvert2G36]

For all you Bible believers, the calculations for the Tribulations and Jesus's return (Google "Abdomination of the Desolation" and "Marshall Swing") point to 2015.75 as the beginning of the Tribulations. I am not basing my decisions on Biblical numerology. Just noting I am aware of this.

Google, done.

[TPTB_need_war]

Monero's implementation is fixed.

Like Bitcoin, only Monero's emission schedule is fixed (by social contract).  

In all other areas, both remain open to improvement, bound only by the constraint of community consensus.

Considering this, it seems to me that another ledger does not have to surpass a dominant ledger in any metric for it to coexist. When the culture of a collective strives for technological advances under the auspices of everlastingly standing against any nefarious PTB, I think this can challenge the thesis that there has to be one dominant ledger, at least immediately. Consider as an imperfect example: Apple vs. Windows.

The argument has been the unit-of-account advantage for a dominant currency. As you (and recently rpietila in the Economics Totalitarianism thread) astutely point out, there are overriding priorities for what we want from money that have less do with unit-of-account.

Bitcoin isn't even a unit-of-account, although it is more widely accepted than any other crypto-currency by far. Yet still I forsee Bitcoin protecting neither my stores-of-wealth nor my ability to do commerce without a 1000 papercuts. Thus I am not contented with Bitcoin as the only dominant money.

I am 90% sure that at least 25% of the readership of this forum shares my articulated perspective. That is a huge market for an altcoin and enough to give it critical mass.

IMO Monero's delimma is they didn't map out a currency usage for it (except for rpietila's game project). But I just had an epiphany on that earlier today (at 2am) and now forsee Monero as an integral part of any project I might do. It turns out Monero can do something that Bitcan't can't (pun intended), which is essential to my current strategy (subject to change).

Appears this forum is under DoS attack again.

[TPTB_need_war]

Monero's implementation is fixed.

Like Bitcoin, only Monero's emission schedule is fixed (by social contract).  

In all other areas, both remain open to improvement, bound only by the constraint of community consensus.

Considering this, it seems to me that another ledger does not have to surpass a dominant ledger in any metric for it to coexist. When the culture of a collective strives for technological advances under the auspices to everlastingly stand against any nefarious PTB, I think this can challenge the thesis that there has to be one dominant ledger, at least immediately. Consider as an imperfect example: Apple vs. Windows.

The assumption seems to rest on the notion that if most miners were not interested in a particular fork, some sufficient fraction could and would attack it.  This is dubious for several reasons.  Among them, they would have to give up the value of mining on their favored chain.  Even if they were not able to mine it profitably (as has happened at least once in Bitcoin's history) they would still have to pay the costs out-of-pocket and hope that they could re-coup the money by ?.?.?.

One of the giant (and almost completely ignored) advantages a Bitcoin which is primarily used as a backing store has is that it can simply freeze for relatively long periods of time if a sufficiently troublesome attack is underway.  For the most part, the sidechains that Bitcoin backs can keep right on humming along an fap.doc can enjoy his latte.  A Bitcoin built to support every peon's real-time needs has no such luxury.  If Bitcoin itself is being supported by technically competent people well distributed around the world, and if there is good communications and transparency about the attack and the defenses being mounted to fend it off, end-users at the sidechain level (or Bitcoin level for that matter) can consider it a nuisance rather that a thing to be terribly concerned about.

p.s., I added the second para because in the event that XT was going and had significant firepower to deploy against Core (unlikely to last long even if it did come to pass) then Core still has relatively little to be concerned about.  Better defenses.  Defenses are what Bitcoin is (or should be) all about.  That's where the real enduring value lays...which fap.doc will learn to his dismay.

edit: slight

My point about the reduced hashrate is if the masses move onto the Fascist side chain (Coinbase, Circle, Paypal, etc) which they will do implicitly without even knowing it, then the cartel has an incentive to use small amount of hashrate to destroy any remaining competition from the original Bitcoin chain.

Ha, any "death by 1000 paper cuts" (sorry closed today try again next week) money is not money in my opinion. That was a very delusional post. Are you guys really thinking like this? There is no value whatsoever and you will be a few fools holding on to a store-of-value that has no bid ever again must be moved into the Fascist coin to get a bid.

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

Note: F2Pool (a.k.a. Discus Fish) rejects 20MB but supports 5-10MB. Certainly not an argument against an increase.

[TPTB_need_war]

I lived for several years in Seoul and had a 100Mbps down / 10Mbps up connection for ~$15/month residential, commercial lines had more. Friends have told me they are now at 1Gbps connections.

How much was your rent and cost-of-living?

I pay $350 per month for two-storey, modern, fully furnished 4 bedroom house in Davao, Philippines. I pay $40 monthly for 1 - 2.5 Mbps down / 0.25 - 0.7 Mbps up. To get faster I would have to move into an office complex in a few designated areas and forsake many other lifestyle choices.

[TPTB_need_war]

the only centralization problem i see is the centralization of Core developers under the Blockstream banner, and their lack economic understanding

I don't understand how you can write that given all I have written in this thread about the inherent centralization in Bitcoin's design.

This discourages me about the rationality of the readers here.

If you have rebuttal to the points I made about Bitcoin technical design being centralized, I'd like to read it to see if it is rational.

your Ideas are too convoluted, the total number of miners and nodes expanding and contracting is in response to market conditions and inevitable, I don't buy the idea of a contraction in the number of mining participants or nodes will continue to the point of centralization

You did not comprehend that I pointed out monopolization mechanisms by which the number of full nodes could even increase yet centralization could still occur.

You also don't seem to comprehend that the number of mining nodes has nothing to do with the fact that consensus has the power to deny transactions. You depend on a diligent human action running full nodes that will fork or blacklist away from any malfeasance. But humans are more self-interested than they are collective goals focused, as the Logic Of Collective Action explains.

Your conceptualization revolving around the # of nodes and economic incentives equilibrium ignores the points I've made about the ability of the cartel to attain the exclusive lowest cost access to electricity and economies-of-scale on hardware optimization.

I've already explained how the incentive structure breaks in numerous scenarios. Do you have your ears covered?

The bold above is happening in real time we get to see empirical evidence very soon. Still home advantage to the central authority who can push there winning card through with a soft fork by offering miners extra revenue for merge mining SC's

And surprisingly there is an idea that can dethrone the central authority by catering to the majority who use the network and run the protocol and many who have an invested interest are watching, and the central authority says the ignorant majority are just ignorant, listen to us we're experts.

So looking at the pole above, it may be causality but there seems to be wisdom in the consensus of the herd. So I think you may end up being wrong let's see.

I hope you are.

The majority of the masses will use the winner-take-all, Fascist side chain. Checkmate.

You don't win against TPTB by playing their game. They are the masters of the Logic of Collective Action.

Edit: the only defense is as I wrote upthread; remove the 50% attack from mining. It is critical that we redesign crypto-currency.

[TPTB_need_war]

Includes the first media coverage I've seen of MPEX's economic doomsday weapon, the GavinCoin Short:

Popescu explained why any hard fork that increases the block size limit is destined for failure:

“The fate of this fork will be exactly the fate of all attempted forks to date : the savvy Bitcoin holders will sell their fake-Bitcoins on the fake network, while double-spending (and thus invalidating) their sale on the actual network, thereby keeping their actual Bitcoin safe (iv). The proceeds of this "victimless" (v) crime will be used to purchase more legitimate Bitcoins on the legitimate network, thus draining away value from the holders of Bitcoin fakes, into the pockets of the legitimate Bitcoin holders.”

This is why the cartel need Blockstream's pegged side chains as a defense against MP when they implement the Fascist side chain. This is why Blockstream has received all the $millions. Ditto 21 Inc. The cartel is funding the WMD.

They are going to burn MP's hands up to his armpits one day.

iCe brigade, why can't you see that TPTB have fooled you into supporting your own demise. Do you enjoy being dogs chasing your tails? Please send this to MP.



P.S. Dirty HLarry and I share the middle name "Henry".

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

I feel the force of the argument, but I think it only applies to the ledger-updating protocol, not the ledger itself. From an investment perspective, the ledger is what matters. The ledger is where the most economically important network effects are.

Even if TPTB can centralize and control the protocol, they can't stop the users of the ledger (BTC holders) from switching to a different ledger-updating protocol. Thus the store of value is maintained, and the network effect of what is now called "the Bitcoin ledger" is maintained. Now they could cut it off in its infancy, push another ledger to compete with it, etc., and that would be damaging, but you'd still have that core group of people who are aligned with the principles Bitcoin was intended to uphold, ready to carry on with that ledger.

One of the general classes of mistakes I see repeated in economic analysis is the erroneous concept that time is reversible.

Path dependencies proliferate not vice versa.

For example, the wealth effect (i.e. market price determines market cap != wealth invested) destroys wealth on the egress.

Are you saying path dependency applies to the ledger as well?

Your logic of collective action arguments may apply to "the masses," but Bitcoin remains usable by those who understand such things, which is globally a decent-sized (and rapidly growing) economic bloc. There is no collectivism in a system where you can fork off or otherwise "exit in place" at will. The logic of voice vs. exit is the dominant dynamic in the Internet economy, which is unburdened by the usual territorial considerations.

[TPTB_need_war]

Bitcoin is a force for good...

You will have the world's eugenics blood on your delusional hands...

[TPTB_need_war]

I feel the force of the argument, but I think it only applies to the ledger-updating protocol, not the ledger itself. From an investment perspective, the ledger is what matters. The ledger is where the most economically important network effects are.

Even if TPTB can centralize and control the protocol, they can't stop the users of the ledger (BTC holders) from switching to a different ledger-updating protocol. Thus the store of value is maintained, and the network effect of what is now called "the Bitcoin ledger" is maintained. Now they could cut it off in its infancy, push another ledger to compete with it, etc., and that would be damaging, but you'd still have that core group of people who are aligned with the principles Bitcoin was intended to uphold, ready to carry on with that ledger.

One of the general classes of mistakes I see repeated in economic analysis is the erroneous concept that time is reversible.

Path dependencies proliferate not vice versa.

For example, the wealth effect (i.e. market price determines market cap != wealth invested) destroys wealth on the egress.

Are you saying path dependency applies to the ledger as well?

Your logic of collective action arguments may apply to "the masses," but Bitcoin remains usable by those who understand such things, which is globally a decent-sized (and rapidly growing) economic bloc. There is no collectivism in a system where you can fork off at will. The logic of voice vs. exit is the dominant dynamic in the Internet economy, which is unburdened by the usual territorial considerations.

MP's WMD juxtaposed with pegged side chains WMD means any fork to a coin with a 50% attack vector is impossible. The freedom to fork is threatened with WMD from both sides. See my prior few posts of the logic.

Afaics, the only viable path forward is to invest out of this dilemma into a superior crypto-currency.

[tvbcof]

...
The assumption seems to rest on the notion that if most miners were not interested in a particular fork, some sufficient fraction could and would attack it.  This is dubious for several reasons.  Among them, they would have to give up the value of mining on their favored chain.  Even if they were not able to mine it profitably (as has happened at least once in Bitcoin's history) they would still have to pay the costs out-of-pocket and hope that they could re-coup the money by ?.?.?.
...

My point about the reduced hashrate is if the masses move onto the Fascist side chain (Coinbase, Circle, Paypal, etc) which they will do implicitly without even knowing it, then the cartel has an incentive to use small amount of hashrate to destroy any remaining competition from the original Bitcoin chain.

Ha, any "death by 1000 paper cuts" (sorry closed today try again next week) money is not money in my opinion. That was a very delusional post. Are you guys really thinking like this? There is no value whatsoever and you will be a few fools holding on to a store-of-value that has no bid ever again.

I value more than anything a robust and flexible defensive capability.  The closer a system gets to 'real time', the less I value it for this exact reason.  From a system analysis point of view, I know how much easier it will be to defend when one has the time and flexibility to take whatever defensive measures are necessary to meet whatever attacks are mounted.

As I've said for years, and I heard Todd promote the concept fairly recently, a system which can probably defend against and attack is much less likely to experience one in the first place.  Core will be quite popular with a lot of us old-timers at the very least.  It will obtain a fair degree of hashing power.  Overcoming this will be costly.  If we can ensure that days-long attacks are ineffective even if they do change the system cycle frequency for the worse, it's going to be expensive to attack on pure sha256 hashing power.  And even if that somehow proves to be sustainable in the long term we are not just going to walk.  Worst case scenario we could change the POW slightly and relegate the current (and likely future) datacenters full of ASIC to the trash heap.

(I actually favor a hard-fork which kicks out the whole current POW algorithm and replaces it with a randomly selected CPU friendly collection of algorithms.  I'd think strongly about favoring such a fork over core (MP) if some trusted group did one in time for the Hearndresen XT attack.  The idea, of course, would be to promote distributed mining like back in the old days.)

Thinking back, I think the Blockstream guys were projecting an expectation of several days to be confident of a peg operation.  I wonder if they are considering some of the possible defensive needs I mention here when they made that projection.  IIRC, the explanation was roughly that they wanted peg operations to be deeply buried in the chain.  Defensive measures  could be one reason for that I suppose.

[TPTB_need_war]

...
The assumption seems to rest on the notion that if most miners were not interested in a particular fork, some sufficient fraction could and would attack it.  This is dubious for several reasons.  Among them, they would have to give up the value of mining on their favored chain.  Even if they were not able to mine it profitably (as has happened at least once in Bitcoin's history) they would still have to pay the costs out-of-pocket and hope that they could re-coup the money by ?.?.?.
...

My point about the reduced hashrate is if the masses move onto the Fascist side chain (Coinbase, Circle, Paypal, etc) which they will do implicitly without even knowing it, then the cartel has an incentive to use small amount of hashrate to destroy any remaining competition from the original Bitcoin chain.

Ha, any "death by 1000 paper cuts" (sorry closed today try again next week) money is not money in my opinion. That was a very delusional post. Are you guys really thinking like this? There is no value whatsoever and you will be a few fools holding on to a store-of-value that has no bid ever again.

I value more than anything a robust and flexible defensive capability.  The closer a system gets to 'real time', the less I value it for this exact reason.  From a system analysis point of view, I know how much easier it will be to defend when one has the time and flexibility to take whatever defensive measures are necessary to meet whatever attacks are mounted.

Given my insight into a design you haven't yet seen, I can conclude that you are conflating issues. The changes in design necessary to make a crypto-currency impervious to 50% attack also enable real-time, decentralized transactions. You assume that real-time requirements correlate with less robust defense, but like all things in technology the devil is in the details and generalizations by n00bs are virtually ALWAYS incorrect.

Another example of incorrect generalization upthread was the assumption that off-chain anonymity could match the autonomy and End-to-end Principle of on-chain ring sigs. On detailed study, this assumption is incorrect and leads to entirely incorrect decision process on unwavering, fanatical, unbalanced support for a dominant Bitcoin.

You all are demonstrating the same quality that you lament about the masses, which is they aren't well informed. You see how that shit works? It is a fact of human nature that specialization is not ubiquitous.

Eventually you are going to have to admit that I over the past years have specialized myself on these issues. However it doesn't imply I am omniscient so I am keeping my ears open here and reading everything with keen interest and I will backtrack and mea culpa as necessary. (not wanting to be boastful and I'd much prefer to be a quiet force, but I am forced to pound my chest a bit here because I want to get some traction on working towards the solution we all need)

As I've said for years, and I heard Todd promote the concept fairly recently, a system which can probably defend against and attack is much less likely to experience one in the first place.

Precisely. Yet Bitcoin "Core" and "XT" (forks or proposals or camps) are both being attacked from all potential directions of escape, e.g. Core folks support pegged side chains yet this can result in a Fascist side chain which makes MP's defense impotent (did you miss that implied point in my prior post?).

Core will be quite popular with a lot of us old-timers at the very least.  It will obtain a fair degree of hashing power.  Overcoming this will be costly.

The cartel has always worked in long time frames (decades and even generations) and relatively small investments such as a few $billion here and there (given their $3+ trillion Black Budget fund admitted by former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and documented in numerous other ways hence) to wipe out a resistance in order to usher in the $300+ trillion wealth grap in the NWO. Come on, you guys are not even bacteria on a flea's ass.

Why do human's have such myopia with conceptualizing relative size?

If we can ensure that days-long attacks are ineffective even if they do change the system cycle frequency for the worse, it's going to be expensive to attack on pure sha256 hashing power.  And even if that somehow proves to be sustainable in the long term we are not just going to walk.  Worst case scenario we could change the POW slightly and relegate the current (and likely future) datacenters full of ASIC to the trash heap.

Instead of playing Whack-A-Mole with hash redesigns, what you could do is adopt my design and use the pegged side chain to spend off of Core and into my design. But then you are supporting the BTC value of the Fascist coin. Much better you will spend your BTC into the Fascist coin and sell, then buy my design.

You will have no other choice than to come into my lap (or the lap of someone who copies my design or creates a derivative).

(I actually favor a hard-fork which kicks out the whole current POW algorithm and replaces it with a randomly selected CPU friendly collection of algorithms.

Smooth, I and others have been down that rabbit hole of technical analysis and that doesn't buy you anything. You will still be in Whack-A-Mole mode.

I'd think strongly about favoring such a fork over core (MP) if some trusted group did one in time for the Hearndresen XT attack.  The idea, of course, would be to promote distributed mining like back in the old days.)

You are describing what I am working on.

Thinking back, I think the Blockstream guys were projecting an expectation of several days to be confident of a peg operation.  I wonder if they are considering some of the possible defensive needs I mention here when they made that projection.  IIRC, the explanation was roughly that they wanted peg operations to be deeply buried in the chain.  Defensive measures  could be one reason for that I suppose.

Pegged side chains should not be ignored. Clearly we are moving to a paradigm where users can choose technology independent of the coin value. This is an important development and I haven't fully analyzed the ramifications yet. I've shared the logic I have thus far on pegged side chains. Feel free to teach me anything I missed in my absence from the prior long thread discussion on them.

[sickpig]

Looks like Gavin's plan to get the miners to join his coup d'état is not going so great, lol

http://cointelegraph.com/news/114481/chinese-exchanges-reject-gavin-andresens-20-mb-block-size-increase

* edit you should say exchanges miners are not as powerful as you fear.  

I think they are overestimating there power. here is a quote from someone who once controlled almost 50% of the Bitcoin hash rate.
As for China I think they are net sellers, and they want to offshore profit, i suspect a lot of volume is also hot air, look at the number of nodes in China and you get a feel for how well Bitcoin has penetrated there.

If the whole of Chinese didn't fork  (all 91 nodes) I think it would have little impact.

A common misunderstanding:  Miners actually have zero influence over hardforking.  If a hard fork is going to happen, it doesn't matter if 99% of miners decide not to follow it.  If all of the major Bitcoin businesses, payment processors, and exchanges move to Bitcoin (New) and the miners all stay on Bitcoin (Old), it doesn't matter, forks do NOT require mining consensus unless the fork requires one, such as the "Block Version 1" -> "Block Version 2" fork, where the network switched to enforcing version 2 blocks after 95% of the last 1000(?) blocks were V2.

Code:

                        Bitcoin Fork A (95% of miners, 5% of businesses)
                      /
Prefork Bitcoin -----
                      \
                       Bitcoin Fork B (5% of miners, 95% of businesses)

Guess which one is going to retain any value?  Especially post-fork when the miners realize they can't exchange their BTC for goods or cash because no exchanges will accept BTC-A coins.

I believe we absolutely need to remove the 1MB block limit.  I'm not opposed to the jump from 1MB to 20MB, as I think it will have very minimal impact what the new limit is for quite some time.  I'm not sure if this jump to 20MB also implements the original proposal for automatically increasing the limit annually.  I do have objections to that one as I think Gavin's original proposed annual increase was FAR too aggressive and optimistic regarding throughput and bandwidth quotas for huge portions of the world.

What I think probably won't matter much though.  With a March 2016 prospective date, I'm not so sure the pool will even still be around by the time it's time to choose a side, given how much noise is being made by regulatory bodies who have absolutely no clue what to do with Bitcoin but sure as hell want to regulate it anyways.

This beg the question: does the 20MB hardfork require increasing the block version?

[TPTB_need_war]

Good summary here:  https://www.coingecko.com/buzz/bitcoin-leaders-speak-up-block-size

Read Charles Hoskinson's (one of original founders of Ethereum and someone whom I used to talk to before he discovered Vitalik) astute comment there:

The blocksize debate is deeper than some arbitrary increase from 1 to X MB. It more clearly demonstrates that Bitcoin as an ecosystem is fundamentally immature and requires a great deal of growth to even come close to meeting the needs of traditional financial actors. We don't have a very good consensus mechanism to propose and make changes to the core protocol. This is clearly shown with Gavin having to threaten to work on XT thereby forking development. Second, there is no clear path forward for scalability. Bill White and others are doing amazing research looking at blockchains as functional animals with ledgers being maps from addresses to lists of assets and transactions as functional transformations. This paradigm basically allows for the double spend problem to be defeated without possessing the full blockchain. In other words, network heterogeneity would be permissible.

Other ideas such as IPFS, Lightning and sidechains further add value to the problem of bloat. Why aren't we focusing on these notions first before trying to weight down the main chain with so much new data? Shouldn't an outcome be forced instead of a can kicked down the road? Furthermore, how does a debate like this even play out? Who ultimately gets to decide? It's just all ugly all around.

Which lead me to Bill White's thread where I discovered Maxwell's comment:

the utility of a committed utxo set has been known for years (also, somewhat later https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=88208.0) it's a rather expensive commitment (e.g. a single spend/create update is factor log(utxo) more IO required) and perhaps not as useful as it seems-- if nodes do not construct their own but jump in mid-stream they only have SPV security of the history.  SPV security is a substantial step down from the Bitcoin security model (in particular people expect the full node rules to limit the damage of dishonest miners) but it might still be reasonable-- but if you're willing to accept SPV security why not go all the way and use a SPV node at a massive cost savings?

With respect to proof of stake, I'm disappointed to see it just applied here with no analysis to the actual security model being used. It appears to be impossible to achieve the same security model as Bitcoin with POS; existing systems compromise with centralized block signers or other external sybil-proof beacon assumptions (which seemingly could just replace the blockchain entirely if you really trusted them). For some applications these might be reasonable trade-offs, but if they're ignored or pretended to be the same trafeoffs as Bitcoin, thats just sloppy cryptography. I'd encourage you to not take these things for granted.

Which leads me back to the linked document I had read last year:

both the single-point-of-failure and double-spending problems cannot be.
They may be alleviated by using multiple signing parties, but the requirement that these parties be
difficult to simultaneously coerce (e.g. by putting them in different legal jurisdictions) conflicts with
the requirement that these parties be trusted by all participants.

Amazing they can get so close to my idea then be blinded by a requirement which isn't required. Elucidates how elusive paradigm shifts can be.

@TPTB_need_war,

You'd make a good Hitler.

Go see a shrink.

Am not joking.

Please unpack. I don't understand. Perhaps you are confusing my detailed explanations on how the participants have walled themselves in and I see only one way out, with the thought that you think I am trying to control the participants. I am trying to drive some rationalization that is time to break out of the corral and I am advocating open source pastures.

Such an egregious unsubstantiated ad hominem accusation demands that you justify it with compelling explanation. I consider that statement to be a hate crime equivalent to pointing a gun at me, because in some countries they commit people who are not insane to mental institutions to take away their life. Note I have flagged your comment as "unsubstantiated hate crime against personal liberty in some jurisdictions" to the moderator which is an action I almost never do because I fundamentally disagree with censorship. I would not flag your comment if you made an argument which I can refute or concede.

[TPTB_need_war]

The majority of the masses will use the winner-take-all, Fascist side chain. Checkmate.

You don't win against TPTB by playing their game. They are the masters of the Logic of Collective Action.

Edit: the only defense is as I wrote upthread; remove the 50% attack from mining. It is critical that we redesign crypto-currency.

The specific damage I think the cartel would do with a 50% attack on the Core side chain is to require KYC identification on all transactions. I don't think they would risk politically to shut off all transactions on the Core side chain and because that would set the precedent of making BTC non-fungible which would retard their aims with Bitcoin.

They key problem in Bitcoin's PoW is there is no criteria by which the evil 50% can differentiated from good nodes which don't attempt to censor the transactions. My design is able to make this distinction and filter the 50% attack from the network by way of a clever paradigm shift proxy and afaics there is no way to game the filter.

[Erdogan]

Micropayments are nice, and the prospect of micropayments have created many business ideas.


The fact is that we don't have micropayments in the fiat realm. If someone wants to dispute that, here is the reasoning: With a credit card, the minimum is practically a few dollars. With more effective debit card systems costing about a fifth of a dollar per transaction, the practical minimum is maybe five dollars. Some shops might want to take a loss and sell less, but that is not viable for all the trades in a business. You can not buy electric power by the kWh, and not gas by the BTU. When measured, it is added up and paid by the month or whatever the custumers prefer and the business can supply.

With base money, the actual fiat paper rectangles and the token coins, there is also limit to how small a transaction can be, due to the cost of handling the money. That is one of the reasons you buy twenty cigarettes and not one, (the other reason is that handling cigarettes one by one is also impractical and therefore costly, but lets focus on the money management costs). Another example is bus tickets, cards of 20 or so is more practical than paying for each ride.

So we don't have microtransactions neither in bitcoin nor in the fiat realm. But what we have with bitcoin, is lower cost for certain types of small transactions. So with bitcoin, we can go some small steps toward microtransactions, but not all the way. This might be temporary, but it works now, and just like alpacca socks, gambling, and narcotics, it is a vector for bitcoin to expand.

So we don't have it, but we have progress, so why complain? It looks like obsession to me.

[TPTB_need_war]

So we don't have it, but we have progress, so why complain? It looks like obsession to me.

Micropayments is (in theory) an orders-of-magnitude larger GDP economy in the future and thus it will (at an exponential rate) subsume any design that can't do it.

The greatest failing of the human race is to misunderstand the exponential function. Humans view exponential change as virtually linear nominal change until suddenly at the end game, the compounding suddenly appears to be waterfall nominal change and the humans are deer-in-the-headlights dazed and confused.

[Erdogan]

So we don't have it, but we have progress, so why complain? It looks like obsession to me.

Micropayments is (in theory) an orders-of-magnitude larger GDP economy in the future and thus it will (at an exponential rate) subsume any design that can't do it.

If someone invents it, I am all for it, just like flying cars. Bitcoin is already invented, and I want to use it because it is advantageous.

[TPTB_need_war]

Another more mathematical way of stating the Logic of Collective Action which I summarized as participants being more self-interested than aligned for the optimization of the public good.

https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/25/proof-stake-learned-love-weak-subjectivity/

Unfortunately, altruism-prime cannot be relied on exclusively, because the value of coins arising from protocol integrity is a public good and will thus be undersupplied (eg. if there are 1000 stakeholders, and each of their activity has a 1% chance of being “pivotal” in contributing to a successful attack that will knock coin value down to zero, then each stakeholder will accept a bribe equal to only 1% of their holdings).

Example:

https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/01/28/p-epsilon-attack/

call the “main” chain A and the attacker’s new double-spend fork B. By default, everyone expects A to win. However, the attacker credibly commits to paying out 25.01 BTC to everyone who mines on B if B ends up losing. Hence, the payoff matrix becomes:

You mine on A   You mine on B
Others mine on A   25   25.01
Others mine on B   0   25

Thus, mining on B is a dominant strategy regardless of one’s epistemic beliefs, and so everyone mines on B, and so the attacker wins and pays out nothing at all. Particularly, note that in proof of work we do not have deposits, so the level of bribe required is proportional only to the mining reward multiplied by the fork length, not the capital cost of 51% of all mining equipment. Hence, from a cryptoeconomic security standpoint, one can in some sense say that proof of work has virtually no cryptoeconomic security margin at all (if you are tired of opponents of proof of stake pointing you to this article by Andrew Poelstra, feel free to link them here in response). If one is genuinely uncomfortable with the weak subjectivity condition of pure proof of stake, then it follows that the correct solution may perhaps be to augment proof of work with hybrid proof of stake by adding security deposits and double-voting-penalties to mining.

Of course, in practice, proof of work has survived despite this flaw, and indeed it may continue to survive for a long time still; it may just be the case that there’s a high enough degree of altruism that attackers are not actually 100% convinced that they will succeed – but then, if we are allowed to rely on altruism, naive proof of stake works fine too. Hence, Schelling schemes too may well simply end up working in practice, even if they are not perfectly sound in theory.

In Nov. 2009 (years before I got interested cryptography) I corrected one of the incorrect answers on Google's IQ test on an analogous observation:

http://unheresy.com/Essence%20of%20Genius.html

You're the captain of a pirate ship...

The answer given above is incorrect. If you offer all the booty to 51% of the crew, one of them might get motivated to vote against your proposal because they have nothing to lose if your proposal wins (and they might want to try their luck at another proposal that offers them more). Contemplate that deeply! Whereas, the correct answer is to propose that anyone who votes NO will not share in the booty. TADA!