Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[freakying99]

Someone needs to change the title of this thread to.

Gold up BTC collapsing

[Peter R]

the drama continues on:

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin.org/pull/894

there's that name Saivann again.  he was involved in the original PressCenter.org debate.

This is getting bizarre…that post has a strange feel, with hints of desperation, like someone is grasping at authority that's slipping through their fingers.  This type of behaviour will only serve to disenfranchise them further, as power migrates to MIT, CoinCenter, and hopefully several new initiatives at university research labs. 

I think I've heard all the arguments, but I still cannot understand the opposition to increasing the blocksize.

[cypherdoc]

the drama continues on:

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin.org/pull/894

there's that name Saivann again.  he was involved in the original PressCenter.org debate.

This is getting bizarre…that post has a strange feel, with hints of desperation, like someone is grasping at authority that's slipping through their fingers.  This type of behaviour will only serve to disenfranchise them further, as power migrates to MIT, CoinCenter, and hopefully several new initiatives at university research labs.  

I think I've heard all the arguments, but I still cannot understand the opposition to increasing the blocksize.

theymos is a strange character that has control of all our media outlets; BCT, Reddit, & apparently Bitcoin.org.

i admired him greatly back in the day b/c he helped me understand Bitcoin thru several pm's and a couple of Skype audio conversations.  at first, he was very hesitant to actually talk to me despite my pleadings that i learn more efficiently with the ability to quickly back and forth from conversation vs typing.  he told me he was very uncomfortable talking even tho i agreed to just the audio on Skype; no video (a concession i made to assuage his awkward social concerns).  he said he types faster than he talks.  he wasn't kidding.  the only way i got him to audio was to pay him 4BTC.  expensive in retrospect but worth it for the knowledge.  he WAS socially awkward and i barely got my money's worth given the difficulty of the communication.  

i've been very disappointed ever since in his allowing forum moderators to essentially run wild around here deleting posts they don't like.  and then with the forum donations for a new site.  i'm certainly not alone.

and now this.  i really think it's a power play by the devs to keep control.  marcus said it flat out.  they want control.

[TPTB_need_war]

I wish Bitcoin used almost no bandwidth as well... but you can't have your cake and eat it too.

Yes you can.

[Peter R]

...
and now this.  i really think it's a power play by the devs to keep control.  marcus said it flat out.  they want control.

This reminds me of something my IRAP ITA said: "Do you want to be rich, or do you want to be king?  Because you can't be both."

On that note, here's an interesting graph that shows that founders usually do finacially better when they relinquish some control in order to allow the company to grow.  I imagine the same dynamic will play out in bitcoin, and that the early devs are suffering from a version of the "rich-vs-king" dilemma.  

[tvbcof]

theymos is a strange character that has control of all our media outlets; BCT, Reddit, & apparently Bitcoin.org.

theymos was one of the very few who saw what a train-wreck TBF was likely to be when Gavin floated the idea and spoke up about it.  I'll let you guess who another one of these lonely voices might have been.

i admired him greatly back in the day b/c he helped me understand Bitcoin thru several pm's and a couple of Skype audio conversations. ...

Questionable.

i've been very disappointed ever since in his allowing forum moderators to essentially run wild around here deleting posts they don't like.  and then with the forum donations for a new site.  i'm certainly not alone.

I've been pleasantly surprised at the intolerance for over-moderation that theymos has displayed.  I can think of almost nothing I've seen deleted and moderators who've tried to do so for overtly political reasons seem to have taken a hike.  Whether on theymos's orders or not I don't know.

I've ribbed they guy over the years for allowing fairly obvious scammers to have a voice but at the end of the day it is in keeping with running a very free platform and I appreciate that.  It sucks to see people taken by scammers, but this platform allows them to come back and inform others which is a very valuable educational experience for everyone and a lesson that everyone who putters around with Bitcoin needs to learn by one method or another.

[justusranvier]

theymos was one of the very few who saw what a train-wreck TBF was likely to be when Gavin floated the idea and spoke up about it.  I'll let you guess who another one of these lonely voices might have been.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=113400.msg1227012#msg1227012

That post also serves as proof that I wasn't singling out Blockstream when I asked them the same question about potential conflicts of interest.

[chriswilmer]

I think I've heard all the arguments, but I still cannot understand the opposition to increasing the blocksize.

Glad I am not the only one!

You'd think this level of hand-wringing about a hard fork would be reserved for changing the 21 million bitcoin limit or something. In 10 years I think this discussion about whether to have 1 MB blocks or 20 MB blocks will sound really strange in our TB-flash-drive streaming-hd-virtual-reality world.

[marcus_of_augustus]

Ok, the derpiness is plumbing new depths of sadness, i think it might be time to check out of the gold collapse and I have some other projects I'd like to work on ... so long and thanx for all the fish sn

bitcoin will scale eventually, patience grasshoppers.

[cypherdoc]

Ok, the derpiness is plumbing new depths of sadness, i think it might be time to check out of the gold collapse and I have some other projects I'd like to work on ... so long and thanx for all the fish sn

bitcoin will scale eventually, patience grasshoppers.

Why do people keep saying they are leaving this thread then always come right back? Maybe I can help:

marcus, don't let the door hit you on the way out.

[solex]

...in fact, both SC and LN _strongly_ prefer the biggest blocksize the network can handle.  What they can't tolerate, however, is Bitcoin being very centralized-- and I don't think your own interests can tolerate that either (assuming you still own some Bitcoin).

reddit post

The experience we have says there will not likely be a dire emergency. We also have reason to believe, from the prior accidental quasi-hardfork, that the mining portion of the network can be updated within a day or two during an actual emergency. A straight-forward blocksize bump also has the benefit of being completely compatible with existing SPV clients (they can't see the blocksize). If there really were a dire situation where it was larger blocks or doom-- I'm confident that larger blocks could be deployed quickly without much trouble; and in that kind of situation: consensus would be easy. No matter how concerned people are about larger sizes, if the choice is really larger or a useless network, the former is preferable to everyone. There is also plenty of room for other creativity, as we saw before in 2013, should the need arise, but it can be hard to predict in advance.

(my emphasis)

Greg is giving me serious cognitive dissonance with these posts.
He is very concerned about the trend to centralization and yet can countenance a quick fork if necessary.

The most harmless hard fork is one which is prepared so far in advance that all software instances are upgraded before it takes effect. Something which was almost achievable if it had been scheduled in early 2013 with the target date about 2 years ahead. That is what Bitcoin needed.

Today, the time for this luxury is gone and about 6000 nodes exist (which accept connections). The worst scenario after a quick fork is 3000 left on each side, with the best scenario somewhere between 3000 and 6000 on the majority side, say 4500 nodes upgrading. The remainder either switching off or flailing away on a chain with a ridiculous difficulty. What a hammer-blow towards the furnace of centralization!

In my opinion, the odds of a dire situation after the 1MB is hit, needing a quick fork, is about 99%. This not an unreasonable interpretation of the separate findings of David Hudson and Statoshi. Even if Greg thinks the odds of needing a fast fork is more like 10% or 20% (otherwise why describe it in the manner above) then this is surely an unacceptable risk.

Meanwhile, Adam has just given us a Hallelujah moment:

A hard-fork takes a long period of time to deploy due to the non-upgrade risk, people are working on things in the mean-time.
There can be a case for some increase to create some breathing room to work on scaling and decentralising tech, I just mean to say that if we do it in isolation, we're not focussing on the big picture.

Progress at last, buying time to smoothly scale the MC, as well as buying time for SC and LN. FFS! How can this be contentious to SC and LN supporters?

Lastly.
Perhaps Peter R can put this one to bed:

Adam claims that the network overhead in scaling Bitcoin is O(n^2), where n=transactions
Mike counters that it is O(nm), where m=nodes

The latter makes more sense to me, and further, that m is not as significant as it appears because it is highly parallelized.

[Peter R]

Adam claims that the network overhead in scaling Bitcoin is O(n^2), where n=transactions
Mike counters that it is O(nm), where m=nodes

The latter makes more sense to me, and further, that m is not as significant as it appears because it is highly parallelized.

The way I see it, if m nodes need to be made aware of n transactions, then the network overhead for bandwidth is O(nm).  

If we assume that the number of nodes is linearly proportional to the number of transactions, then m = kn and the network overhead is O(n²).  But as you mentioned, m is probably not this significant.  In fact, for the last several years m has gone down as n has gone up, so the network overhead empirically is more like O(n^0.7) (i.e., better than linear).  

Interesting question: right now the Bitcoin network processes about 1 transaction per second while the Visa network processes about 2000.  Right now there are about 6,000 full nodes. If Bitcoin grew to reach Visa's level of transactions per second (2000X growth), would we expect the number of full nodes to grow from 6,000 to 12,000,000?

The other thing I don't understand is why people focus on the network overhead rather than the overhead to run a single node.  As far as I can see, this should always be roughly O(n).  

[justusranvier]

The other thing I don't understand is why people focus on the network overhead rather than the overhead to run a single node.  As far as I can see, this should always be roughly O(n).  

Its hard to scare people when you talk about O(n) costs per node.

[solex]

Adam claims that the network overhead in scaling Bitcoin is O(n^2), where n=transactions
Mike counters that it is O(nm), where m=nodes

The latter makes more sense to me, and further, that m is not as significant as it appears because it is highly parallelized.

The way I see it, if m nodes need to be made aware of n transactions, then the network overhead for bandwidth is O(nm).  

If we assume that the number of nodes is linearly proportional to the number of transactions, then m = kn and the network overhead is O(n²).  But as you mentioned, m is probably not this significant.  In fact, for the last several years m has gone down as n has gone up, so the network overhead empirically is more like O(n^0.7) (i.e., better than linear).  

Interesting question: right now the Bitcoin network processes about 1 transaction per second while the Visa network processor about 2000.  Right now there are about 6,000 full nodes. If Bitcoin grew to reach Visa's level of transactions per second (2000X growth), would we expect the number of full nodes to grow from 6,000 to 12,000,000?

The other thing I don't understand is why people focus on the network overhead rather than the overhead to run a single node.  As far as I can see, this should always be roughly O(n).  

Thanks Peter, this helps.
We can also think of it as O(2n) because of the re-broadcasting, which IBLT would do a lot to mitigate, especially as the re-broadcast is the time critical component, and the capacity of the network in a true O(n) state is already more like 300 tps than 3 tps.

I don't think the full node count would scale as far as 12m in the growth example above, but payment channels for node services would at least reverse the decline even when it becomes necessary to support that loading.

The other thing I don't understand is why people focus on the network overhead rather than the overhead to run a single node.  As far as I can see, this should always be roughly O(n).  

Its hard to scare people when you talk about O(n) costs per node.

Absolutely!

[Peter R]

I don't think the full node count would scale as far as 12m in the growth example above, but payment channels for node services would at least reverse the decline even when it becomes necessary to support that loading.

I agree.  

I've been thinking a lot about full node count lately, and I could also imagine a future where node count continues to decline but network decentralization actually improves.  

Let's imagine a distant future where:

  - Every major research university operates 1 full node on average (there's 108 in the US, 15 in Canada, and let's assume 150 elsewhere). That makes about 280 nodes.  

  - Every major bitcoin company in this "bitcoin future" and every mining pool operates a full node.  Assume another 280 nodes.  

  - Various branches of governments in most countries run a few nodes.  Assume 190 countries x 2 nodes = 380 nodes.

  - And a bunch of wealthy bitcoiners operate their own nodes.  Assume another 300 or so.
 
This gives a total of only ~1,240 nodes, but I think such a configuration would be more decentralized than the current state of the network.  

I'm not suggesting that this will actually happen, just pointing out that the network doesn't necessarily need hundreds of thousands of nodes.  

[Peter R]

All of these groups I identified would also be fairly insensitive to the cost of running a node.

- the academics will apply for grants to operate their nodes so they can perform research

- the businesses and miners will run nodes as a cost of doing business

- the governments will run nodes for law enforcement, surveillance, and other purposes.

- the power users will run nodes because they want to.

Would it really be so bad if the far future looked like this?  

[solex]

All of these groups I identified would also be fairly insensitive to the cost of running a node.

- the academics will apply for grants to operate their nodes so they can perform research

- the businesses and miners will run nodes as a cost of doing business

- the governments will run nodes for law enforcement, surveillance, and other purposes.

- the power users will run nodes because they want to.

Would it really be so bad if the far future looked like this?  

Maybe not that bad, and if general technology companies are considered separate from Bitcoin-focused businesses, then perhaps another 155 could be added for them, as per the MSCI World Index (IT).
https://www.msci.com/resources/factsheets/index_fact_sheet/msci-world-information-technology-index-usd-net.pdf

It is easy to imagine that even non-Bitcoin tech companies would want to run at least one node to have a hook into a real-world blockchain instance..

Microsoft supports Bitcoin XT! 

[TPTB_need_war]

and now this.  i really think it's a power play by the devs to keep control.  marcus said it flat out.  they want control.

This does appear to be a power struggle between the Bitcoin Foundation and the "core developers".

It appears that the Foundation side has decided that the "core developers" are dispensable and that they are gaining too much leverage which is dangerous given their business conflict-of-interest with Blockstream.

All of this is indicative of the fact that Bitcoin is not yet on auto-pilot and is not decentralized. It is rather a power struggle of vested interests.

It doesn't matter which direction this power play goes because the writing in already on the wall as to the overall outcome of Bitcoin core sinking into a morass and either a subsumption or orthogonal alternative via pegged side chains will eventually emerge.

This is why I have suggested to Gregory that they just give up the control and march on. Their tech can't be controlled by Bitcoin core, so they should just ignore this power struggle and focus on where their inherit power is implicit.

Any way, none of it matters to my work (not even the timing of the viability of pegged side chains). I can carry on where my power is implicit.

What I do know is that after spending a lot of time reading about Bitcoin for the past several years, and getting a feel for some of the people involved, I would prefer to stay far, far away from anything that is related to Mike Hearn. For the life of me, I can't even understand why someone like him is interested in Bitcoin (unless it's to change it into something else entirely). I'm thankful that he has barely touched Bitcoin Core.

So I oppose BitcoinXT, but not necessarily a block size increase.

Astute separation-of-concerns.

The other thing I don't understand is why people focus on the network overhead rather than the overhead to run a single node.  As far as I can see, this should always be roughly O(n).  

Its hard to scare people when you talk about O(n) costs per node.

Scary only if you want anyone in the world to be able to directly participate in mining consensus.

If you don't care about some centralization due to the regulatory oversight (an example of an out-of-band incentive that obviates the assumption of a Nash equilibrium) that can placed on those who can meet much higher minimum resource requirements, then sure go on your merry way. Regulatory capture is incestuous.

But don't even begin to dream about on-the-block-chain micropayments with any semblance of decentralization.

[TPTB_need_war]

check out of the gold collapse

I told you all upthread there would likely be a bounce this June in both gold and BTC but the final lows are still coming.

I continue (via Armstrong) to predict every price move. Yet I (and he) get no acknowledgement.

[Zarathustra]

check out of the gold collapse

I told you all upthread there would likely be a bounce this June in both gold and BTC but the final lows are still coming.

I continue (via Armstrong) to predict every price move. Yet I (and he) get no acknowledgement.

What a shame! The feet of the prophets are to be kissed!