Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[lunarboy]

This should be interesting to watch,

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3agk61/ultimate_bitcoin_stress_test_monday_june_22nd/

By 14:00 GMT Monday June 22, the mempool of standard fee transactions will be 10mb By 24:00 GMT Monday June 22nd, the mempool of standard fee transactions will be 130mb By 13:00 GMT Tuesday June 22rd, the mempool of standard fee transactions will be 241mb

At this point the backlog of transactions will be approximately 241 blocks, or 1.67 days. When the average new transactions are factored into the equation, the backlog could drag on for 2-3 days. At this point, questions are raised such as whether or not this will cause a "crash landing." It is impossible to know with certainty, however we are anxiously looking forward to Monday.

[solex]

Peter Todd again. I don't like this.

Yesterday F2Pool, currently the largest pool with 21% of the hashing power, enabled full replace-by-fee (RBF) support after discussions with me. This means that transactions that F2Pool has will be replaced if a conflicting transaction pays a higher fee. There are no requirements for the replacement transaction to pay addresses that were paid by the previous transaction.

http://www.mail-archive.com/bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net/msg08422.html

I've never understood Peter Todd's rationale for promoting replace-by-fee.  

The way Bitcoin was designed, if a node sees a second transaction that spends an output already spent by a previous transaction, it ignores the second transaction.  The result is that the second (and in most cases, fraudulent) transaction propagates to very few nodes and has little chance of being mined into a block.  If the entire network applies this policy homogeneously, double-spending zero-confirm transactions is very difficult, especially if merchants just wait a few second to monitor the propagation of the TX with a well-connected listening node.

What Peter Todd's "replace-by-fee" support does, is allows any unconfirmed transaction to be removed from a node's mempool if a conflicting transaction, received after the original transaction, pays a higher fee.  If all nodes in the network adopted this policy, it would make zero-confirm transactions trivially-easy to double spend.  

Is there some benefit to RBF that I'm missing?  This seems like a reckless policy.  

Peter Todd's promotion of replace-by-fee scorched-earth is an attempt to keep the 1MB by the "back door", an attempt to realize the "Bitcoin as digital gold only for high-value transactions" dream. The effect of this change is to eliminate small purchases e.g. for cups of coffee, which require a workable zero-conf environment. Buying a car where the parties can wait for block confirmations would still be fine. He says that "zero-conf never worked" yet BitPay's business model repeatedly proves this false, every hour of every day.

I summarize my feelings here with:
Bitcoin as digital gold only for high-value transactions is a castle built upon quicksand. Bitcoin as digital gold for all transactions, where fiat is normally used, is a castle built upon solid rock.

Edit: this is interesting wrt tx vols:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3ag3jr/number_of_bitcoin_transactions_follows_cubic_trend/

[justusranvier]

This should be interesting to watch,

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3agk61/ultimate_bitcoin_stress_test_monday_june_22nd/

By 14:00 GMT Monday June 22, the mempool of standard fee transactions will be 10mb By 24:00 GMT Monday June 22nd, the mempool of standard fee transactions will be 130mb By 13:00 GMT Tuesday June 22rd, the mempool of standard fee transactions will be 241mb

At this point the backlog of transactions will be approximately 241 blocks, or 1.67 days. When the average new transactions are factored into the equation, the backlog could drag on for 2-3 days. At this point, questions are raised such as whether or not this will cause a "crash landing." It is impossible to know with certainty, however we are anxiously looking forward to Monday.

The SatoshiDice stress tess was a lot better than this plan.

At least the capacity problems they caused were from actual customers receving a service for which they were willing to pay rather than admitted spam.

[smooth]

Comparing a successful fork to a runaway sidechain.

A chain fork, while painful, will succeed only if the fork is better than the original. A bitcoiner need only do nothing to join the fork.

A sidechain will either be less valuable and therefore be very small, or more valuable and therefore run away. A bitcoiner might be left behind, unless he converts to the sidechain in time.

I prefer a chain fork to a runaway sidechain.

Yes, chain fork = (Peter R's) spin off, though the latter carries a connotation of being done in a somewhat less chaotic fashion. As I said before, spin offs make a lot more sense than side chains as a way to (potentially) upgrade bitcoin. Even Adam's one-way pegs are better than side chains, but spin offs are better than one way pegs.

But Blockstream's two-way pegged side chains don't runaway from your BTC value. Thus they are best, because they are not all-or-nothing choices, you can go back and forth, and your BTC value is protected.

I consider the entire scheme unstable and unsound, and quite plausibly will never even be implemented (in other than federated form, at which point it instead becomes uninteresting).

Spin offs are not an all-or-nothing choice. You can simply do nothing and perpetually retain the full value of your original holdings. In the case where a spin off actually goes somewhere (retains non-trivial value for some non-trvial period of time), for new holdings/transactions you can do the same by acquiring/selling a bundle consisting of equal (or proportional in general) amounts of each coin (or wallets and tools can do this automatically as long as the outcome remains unclear).

At the leading edge of the block size ruckus, someone on this thread (although I don't remember who it was), reinvented the same concept starting with the idea of a chain fork. The idea being to improve the tools so that chain forks can occur sanely and the contentious political debates such as the block size can be avoided and left to the market instead.

Of course, a fair criticism of this is the requirement to develop and deploy better tools for users to transact using multiple chains. However, sidechains require the same sort of development and deployment.

EDIT: I suppose one way SPV sidechains could be implemented would be with a non-consensus chain fork i.e. spin-off. So there is that.

[tvbcof]

Peter Todd's promotion of replace-by-fee scorched-earth is an attempt to keep the 1MB by the "back door", an attempt to realize the "Bitcoin as digital gold only for high-value transactions" dream. The effect of this change is to eliminate small purchases e.g. for cups of coffee, which require a workable zero-conf environment. Buying a car where the parties can wait for block confirmations would still be fine. He says that "zero-conf never worked" yet BitPay's business model repeatedly proves this false, every hour of every day.

How unsurprising to see you so upset about a method of creating an actual market for transaction processing.  What will the welfare bums do if without commies like you to make sure they have low-cost or free access under a highly subsidized exchange currency to buy their energy drinks (converted from fiat that came out of my pocket complements of the State's own transfer of wealth schemes.)

I summarize my feelings here with:
Bitcoin as digital gold only for high-value transactions is a castle built upon quicksand. Bitcoin as digital gold for all transactions, where fiat is normally used, is a castle built upon solid rock.

As soon as enough people can be squeezed, fungibility can be attacked by tainting.  This would be trivial to do through the mainstream legal system entirely independent of the protocol, code, infrastructure operators, etc.  The only necessary ingredient is a mass of sheep using the system so that a reasonable segment of the user-base is responsive to differential value attacks.  Building this userbase is where you and cypherdoc come in handy.

Your solution for the core value foundation is not even built on quicksand.  It's built on a completely imaginary cloud.  The ONLY thing holding the disaster back at this moment is that the attackers are smart enough not to jump to soon and are giving you some time to do your work.

[cypherdoc]

 Building this userbase is where you and cypherdoc come in handy.

yep, you got it butthead.

build it across Africa, SE Asia, Russia, & the Middle East.  all territories in which your authoritarianism is impotent.

[tvbcof]

Building this userbase is where you and cypherdoc come in handy.

yep, you got it butthead.

build it across Africa, SE Asia, Russia, & the Middle East.  all territories in which your authoritarianism is impotent.

Kumbaya my Node*, Kumbaya.

_{(*) high bandwidth required.  All others use Multibitch.}

[Cconvert2G36]

Building this userbase is where you and cypherdoc come in handy.

yep, you got it butthead.

build it across Africa, SE Asia, Russia, & the Middle East.  all territories in which your authoritarianism is impotent.

Kumbaya my Node*, Kumbaya.

_{(*) high bandwidth required.  All others use Multibitch.}

A full node on every cell phone, a chicken in every pot.

[2112]

At the leading edge of the block size ruckus, someone on this thread (although I don't remember who it was), reinvented the same concept starting with the idea of a chain fork. The idea being to improve the tools so that chain forks can occur sanely and the contentious political debates such as the block size can be avoided and left to the market instead.

Of course, a fair criticism of this is the requirement to develop and deploy better tools for users to transact using multiple chains. However, sidechains require the same sort of development and deployment.

Well, I proposed and published the idea of "digital prospectus" and its "amendments" here on this forum late in 2011.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=54382.0

I wore this in my forum signature since then.

As one would expect, the developers actually don't want to be held to their word of "not changing" or "changing only for better" when there are means to actually set those promises in the "cryptographic stone" as opposed to the present state-of-the-art "pinky swear".

It is up to investors to force the developers to behave, not vice-versa.

[cypherdoc]

follow this conversation and you'll realize who and what we're having to deal with:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3agk61/ultimate_bitcoin_stress_test_monday_june_22nd/cscgdwy

[tvbcof]

A full node on every cell phone, a chicken in every pot.

LOL!  I like it!

Actually, one of my rationals for keeping Bitcoin lite and tight is that I could see users getting a significant break on some sidchain implementations if they supported the Bitcoin network as something of a tag-along even if they never needed to use it natively.

Even if sidechains are lazy and will let others do the work of securing the backing store (which must be assumed for design purposes) I could imagine sidechains themselves needing to compete with one another to exercise their pegging operations against the mainchain in a timely manner.  If their own userbase were supporting Bitcoin this could give them an extra advantage over simply paying reasonable fees.

I'll mention again that in efficient sidechain implementations, a single backing store adjustment (Bitcoin transaction) might reflect many thousands of underlying user-level transactions.  Thus, users really could pay a trivial fee.  The economics of native Bitcoin support are then equivalent as a low-use backing store and a high use 'one-size-fits-all' scenario it just that the risk of centralization is just about the opposite.  Indeed, various sidechains can target different (and sometimes mutually exclusive) market segments so mass utilization rates could be much higher (along with the reward for supporting native Bitcoin of course.)

[TPTB_need_war]

follow this conversation and you'll realize who and what we're having to deal with:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3agk61/ultimate_bitcoin_stress_test_monday_june_22nd/cscgdwy

You are dealing with someone who is technically correct (but politically naive):

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3agk61/ultimate_bitcoin_stress_test_monday_june_22nd/cscmlla

[TPTB_need_war]

Comparing a successful fork to a runaway sidechain.

A chain fork, while painful, will succeed only if the fork is better than the original. A bitcoiner need only do nothing to join the fork.

A sidechain will either be less valuable and therefore be very small, or more valuable and therefore run away. A bitcoiner might be left behind, unless he converts to the sidechain in time.

I prefer a chain fork to a runaway sidechain.

Yes, chain fork = (Peter R's) spin off, though the latter carries a connotation of being done in a somewhat less chaotic fashion. As I said before, spin offs make a lot more sense than side chains as a way to (potentially) upgrade bitcoin. Even Adam's one-way pegs are better than side chains, but spin offs are better than one way pegs.

But Blockstream's two-way pegged side chains don't runaway from your BTC value. Thus they are best, because they are not all-or-nothing choices, you can go back and forth, and your BTC value is protected.

I consider the entire scheme unstable and unsound, and quite plausibly will never even be implemented (in other than federated form, at which point it instead becomes uninteresting).

Because of the vulnerability of the network to 50% attacks? But what if a side chain isn't vulnerable to 50% attacks. Any other reasons you think it is unstable and unsound?

Why is federated uninteresting? The masses don't give a hoot about theoretical decentralization (otherwise they wouldn't buy Bitcoin nor Monero nor any other existing cryptocoin in first place because none are theoretical sound decentralization).

Whose leg are we pulling here.

[muhrohmat]

well the quimical value we give to bitcoin like rock gold etc its related to our induced apreciation for money insted for instances other things and that can be very high yes like more than gold soo its possible the rise

[TPTB_need_war]

Building this userbase is where you and cypherdoc come in handy.

yep, you got it butthead.

build it across Africa, SE Asia, Russia, & the Middle East.  all territories in which your authoritarianism is impotent.

Kumbaya my Node*, Kumbaya.

_{(*) high bandwidth required.  All others use Multibitch.}

A full node on every cell phone, a chicken in every pot.

A full node in every stick of bubble gum, and a whole earth in every pot.*

* when the hacker humor goes opaque, they shouldn't know they are being ridiculed.

OMG  :     Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.  (Read 1166666 times)

[smooth]

Comparing a successful fork to a runaway sidechain.

A chain fork, while painful, will succeed only if the fork is better than the original. A bitcoiner need only do nothing to join the fork.

A sidechain will either be less valuable and therefore be very small, or more valuable and therefore run away. A bitcoiner might be left behind, unless he converts to the sidechain in time.

I prefer a chain fork to a runaway sidechain.

Yes, chain fork = (Peter R's) spin off, though the latter carries a connotation of being done in a somewhat less chaotic fashion. As I said before, spin offs make a lot more sense than side chains as a way to (potentially) upgrade bitcoin. Even Adam's one-way pegs are better than side chains, but spin offs are better than one way pegs.

But Blockstream's two-way pegged side chains don't runaway from your BTC value. Thus they are best, because they are not all-or-nothing choices, you can go back and forth, and your BTC value is protected.

I consider the entire scheme unstable and unsound, and quite plausibly will never even be implemented (in other than federated form, at which point it instead becomes uninteresting).

Because of the vulnerability of the network to 50% attacks? But what if a side chain isn't vulnerable to 50% attacks.

In that case, assuming other more serious compromises aren't made, then your system is simply far superior to Bitcoin. You should replace it and not carry the Bitcoin system around as unnecessary and uncompetitive overhead.

Any other reasons you think it is unstable and unsound?

Economically I don't believe that two different assets can be successfully pegged to the same price, especially not in a decentralized manner (though doing it in a centralized manner also likely fails to a version of the calculation problem). If you extrapolate from this premise, it is clear that various failure modes are inevitable, some quite catastrophic. But possibly people are mostly smart enough to stay clear of the whole thing in which case the failure mode is non-catestrophic (a whimper not a bang).

Why is federated uninteresting? The masses don't give a hoot about theoretical decentralization (otherwise they wouldn't buy Bitcoin nor Monero nor any other existing cryptocoin in first place because none are theoretical sound decentralization).

Whose leg are we pulling here.

I don't really care what the masses buy, except in so far as I can successfully front run them.

Non-decentralized systems are uninteresting because there are many well known ways to implement them that don't have the cost and performance compromises nor the user-unfriendliness of blockchains.

[lunarboy]

This should be interesting to watch,

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3agk61/ultimate_bitcoin_stress_test_monday_june_22nd/

By 14:00 GMT Monday June 22, the mempool of standard fee transactions will be 10mb By 24:00 GMT Monday June 22nd, the mempool of standard fee transactions will be 130mb By 13:00 GMT Tuesday June 22rd, the mempool of standard fee transactions will be 241mb

At this point the backlog of transactions will be approximately 241 blocks, or 1.67 days. When the average new transactions are factored into the equation, the backlog could drag on for 2-3 days. At this point, questions are raised such as whether or not this will cause a "crash landing." It is impossible to know with certainty, however we are anxiously looking forward to Monday.

The SatoshiDice stress tess was a lot better than this plan.

At least the capacity problems they caused were from actual customers receving a service for which they were willing to pay rather than admitted spam.

Agreed, but with a permission-less ledger nobody can or should be able to stop them. So if the protocol breaks from a $300/hour usage test it wasn't worth much to begin with. Time to address the issues and and scale up.

[justusranvier]

So if the protocol breaks from a $300/hour usage test it wasn't worth much to begin with.

Of course the protocol is not going to break. Does anyone thing it will?

It's not about the protocol or the network.

[lunarboy]

So if the protocol breaks from a $300/hour usage test it wasn't worth much to begin with.

Of course the protocol is not going to break. Does anyone thing it will?

It's not about the protocol or the network.

Ok break, is a little harsh. The usage of the term depends on the same structural divides currently splintering the development. Namely, what is the protocol/network for? It will be broken under this stress test WRT micro transactions, as they will be crowded out due to cost.

I don't want to comment further on this as I don't feel qualified to pass judgement. I do feel it's an interesting development, and am intrigued to see where the chips land afterwards. Will certain peoples standpoints soften? Will it spark some development compromise? Or is the whole idea some sort of scam to somehow make a few coins?
 

[cypherdoc]

So if the protocol breaks from a $300/hour usage test it wasn't worth much to begin with.

Of course the protocol is not going to break. Does anyone thing it will?

It's not about the protocol or the network.

Ok break, is a little harsh. The usage of the term depends on the same structural divides currently splintering the development. Namely, what is the protocol/network for? It will be broken under this stress test WRT micro transactions, as they will be crowded out due to cost.

I don't want to comment further on this as I don't feel qualified to pass judgement. I do feel it's an interesting development, and am intrigued to see where the chips land afterwards. Will certain peoples standpoints soften? Will it spark some development compromise? Or is the whole idea some sort of scam to somehow make a few coins?
 

My bet would be that the Coinwallet ploy is tied to that large asymmetric bid wall on BFX which is probably someone's short position trying to get out.