Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[iCEBREAKER]

Am I being sensitive or is this an unnecessarily spiteful reply from Greg Maxwell?:

...
You've shown that you can throw a bunch of symbolic markup and mix in a lack of understanding and measurement and make a pseudo-scientific argument that will mislead a lot of people, and that you're willing to do so or too ignorant to even realize what you're doing.

He sounds bitter.

Oh boo hoo, poor Peter got mildly but most-deservedly flamed for spouting pseudo-scientific nonsense on stilts.  He'll be in therapy for years!  

Gmax is just understandably impatient with his job being made harder by the Gavinistas' endless defamation, exaggerations, BS, and agitprop:

your analysis was off by orders of magnitude even in the most charitable interpretation
perhaps you should keep in mind that sharing a work which confirms political preferences with a largely non-technical crowd is not likely to bring useful additional criticism.

Gmax is not a punching bag; he's allowed to hit back when people accuse him of obstructionism for personal profit.  The Gavinista whining about 'ad hom' in that context is spectacularly hypocritical.  "I'll post the napkin pic illustrating Evil Blockstream's Snidely Whiplash scheme, then tsk-tsk Gmax for reacting with anything more than cool professional detachment...that'll show everyone what Awful People the core devs are!"

But nevermind that, let's all weep for poor barbequed Peter.  I'll send him some aloe vera lotion, care of the burn ward.  

[TPTB_need_war]

One of the signs of leadership is being able to get everyone working together.

You can't necessarily ever get everyone working together. Nevertheless a great many people are indeed working together a year later, and that should say something about the leadership. When you count the core developers, contributing developers to the core project, people working on Monaro-related businesses such as MyMonero and Crypto-Kingdom, mining pools, various independent developers and other significant projects (such as the new Android mobile wallet) there are at least several dozen actual developers working on various parts aspects of it, along with many non-developers contributing in their own ways too.

I noted that accomplishment recently in the Monero thread:

It is great to see all these people working together to accomplish a goal. I know it is a great feeling for the developers to reach a point of critical mass.

It does however have a certain level groupthink (non-objectivity) attached to it, and people tend to emotionally marry the investments they feel a teamwork attachment to.

I don't know why I am making this comment. Perhaps I am saying I envy or relish the feeling of being involved in a great team result,  but also those damn black swans. C'est la vie.

Be prepared for a black swan event though.

By everyone, I could mean a much wider scope than even Bitcoin's community now.

My point about wanting to differentiate as MJ did and not be Lebron is apropos. I still remember MJ's sophomore 63 points against Larry Bird and the Celtics. And his transformation to a team winner of 6 championships, with a ragtag group.

I aim big and fail often. Sometimes (3 times so far) I succeeded. You guys pursued the safe and timid route. And well describes the difference in our demeanor too smooth. I am a much more flamboyant risk taker. You are the quintessential diversified, steady handed capitalist. I have the traits of an artist, you the traits of an actuarial (well at least in terms of your investments, I don't know about your other hobbies). I respect your logic skills and often your level-headed judgement. But we can't tame an artist. They have an innate, incessant drive to create.

[iCEBREAKER]

Rarely, do good critics make better artist. ATM Ben Jonson, the poet/critic is the only example I can think of, but that is more of a tie than him being better at one or the other.

Siskel had godawful shitty taste in Hollywood palaver and thus couldn't be expected to do any better himself.

OTOH, Charlie Brooker is a fantastically vicious UK media critic and social commenter.  He also makes superlative TV, like Dead Set and Black Mirror.

The 'conflict-of-interest' canard is an excuse by and for those who can't but presume to opine on whose who can.

[TPTB_need_war]

But nevermind that, let's all weep for poor barbequed Peter.  I'll send him some aloe vera lotion, care of the burn ward.  

Now I understand your username. The heat of the venom. I suppose if one can't take heat, get out of the kitchen?

[BlindMayorBitcorn]

Am I being sensitive or is this an unnecessarily spiteful reply from Greg Maxwell?:

...
You've shown that you can throw a bunch of symbolic markup and mix in a lack of understanding and measurement and make a pseudo-scientific argument that will mislead a lot of people, and that you're willing to do so or too ignorant to even realize what you're doing.

He sounds bitter.

Oh boo hoo, poor Peter got mildly but most-deservedly flamed for spouting pseudo-scientific nonsense on stilts.  He'll be in therapy for years!  

Gmax is just understandably impatient with his job being made harder by the Gavinistas' endless defamation, exaggerations, BS, and agitprop:

your analysis was off by orders of magnitude even in the most charitable interpretation
perhaps you should keep in mind that sharing a work which confirms political preferences with a largely non-technical crowd is not likely to bring useful additional criticism.

Gmax is not a punching bag; he's allowed to hit back when people accuse him of obstructionism for personal profit.  The Gavinista whining about 'ad hom' in that context is spectacularly hypocritical.  "I'll post the napkin pic illustrating Evil Blockstream's Snidely Whiplash scheme, then tsk-tsk Gmax for reacting with anything more than cool professional detachment...that'll show everyone what Awful People the core devs are!"

But nevermind that, let's all weep for poor barbequed Peter.  I'll send him some aloe vera lotion, care of the burn ward.  

I think this was a shot at Gavin

But would you prefer I no longer engage and support people on reddit, and rather play the role of an aloof figure head the way that many who do far less and yet receive far more respect do?

[thezerg]

Am I being sensitive or is this an unnecessarily spiteful reply from Greg Maxwell?:

...
You've shown that you can throw a bunch of symbolic markup and mix in a lack of understanding and measurement and make a pseudo-scientific argument that will mislead a lot of people, and that you're willing to do so or too ignorant to even realize what you're doing.

He sounds bitter.

Oh boo hoo, poor Peter got mildly but most-deservedly flamed for spouting pseudo-scientific nonsense on stilts.  He'll be in therapy for years!  

Gmax is just understandably impatient with his job being made harder by the Gavinistas' endless defamation, exaggerations, BS, and agitprop:

your analysis was off by orders of magnitude even in the most charitable interpretation
perhaps you should keep in mind that sharing a work which confirms political preferences with a largely non-technical crowd is not likely to bring useful additional criticism.

Gmax is not a punching bag; he's allowed to hit back when people accuse him of obstructionism for personal profit.  The Gavinista whining about 'ad hom' in that context is spectacularly hypocritical.  "I'll post the napkin pic illustrating Evil Blockstream's Snidely Whiplash scheme, then tsk-tsk Gmax for reacting with anything more than cool professional detachment...that'll show everyone what Awful People the core devs are!"

But nevermind that, let's all weep for poor barbequed Peter.  I'll send him some aloe vera lotion, care of the burn ward.  

Gmaxes argument lives and dies on his assertion of 80ms block validation times.  We now have to go off and independently verify this.  Then we have to figure out the discrepancy between this number and the painfully slow sync times and 100% cpu use during sync.  This work may discover inefficiencies and result in optimizations that have nothing to do with the holy war going on.  Peter is looking at the system as a black box and analyzing its emergent properties.  Gmax is looking inside the box.  We need to resolve the contradiction.

Regardless gmaxes argument was not a barbecue -- that would have happened if the math was flawed for example.  In fact gmax's "argument" is just another guy making an unsubstantiated (but likely true) contrary claim.  You know this because what if you run core and post "that's funny I am seeing 5 sec times"? What happens is gmaxes entire argument fails.

    Its sad that you can't tell the difference between an argument and an unsubstantiated claim.

[TheRealSteve]

( seeing as I was poking the bear anyway: Bitcoin Block sizes and # of transactions by pool attr [imgur.com album] )

[pönde]

I think it is correct to invest small amounts in many promising, +EV projects, Bitcoin and Monero (and Newcoin) included.

What are +EV projects? What is Newcoin?

[cypherdoc]

right back at it:

[Peter R]

Peter is looking at the system as a black box and analyzing its emergent properties.  Gmax is looking inside the box.  We need to resolve the contradiction.

Thanks for pointing out the difference between the black-box approach and "looking inside the box."  I think the black box approach is useful because it forces us to consider the actual behaviour of the complete system, and then ask if our understanding of the inner pieces make sense given our observations. 

The other thing is that in my model, τ, is more properly the time delay between when the miner has enough information to begin mining on the previous blockheader, and when he has fully verified the previous block, created a new non-empty block to mine on, and sent the block template for that non-empty block to his hash power to begin working on it.  Gmax was only considering one component of this time delay.  

[justusranvier]

Thanks for pointing out the difference between the black-box approach and "looking inside the box."  I think the black box approach is useful because it forces us to consider the actual behaviour of the complete system, and then ask if our understanding of the inner pieces make sense given these measurements.

The #bitcoin-wizards have fallen into that trap before, when the btcd team announced the results of their benchmarking on large simnet blocks.

Their complete system measurements were quite a bit slower than what the individual component microbenchmarks suggested.

If you look at the comments made regarding their blog post, you'll see the same dynamic playing out as is here.

[cypherdoc]

ok, i couldn't but help notice the contradiction:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3c579i/yesterdays_fork_suggests_we_dont_need_a_blocksize/cssz5ea

awaiting a response.

[cypherdoc]

Conclusion: As the average blocksize gets larger, the time to verify the previous block also gets larger. This means that miners will be motivated to improve how quickly their nodes can perform the ECDSA operations needed to verify blocks or that they will be more motivated to trick the system.

you missed the most important alternative of all. 

miners will pare down block sizes for maximum verification times and propagation times.

[cypherdoc]

Don't get put-off from posting by Greg's feedback as it is easy to be silenced by someone-who-knows-best and let them run the show.
My big takeaway from his comment is how you got him into arguing from a position that big blocks are OK (handclap and kudos to you). In fact, I have learnt now that even 7.5GB blocks are today theoretically tolerable in at least one respect (validation where tx are pre-validated), although l suspect not in quite a number of other crucial respects.
Wasn't Gavin's doubling end-point 8GB in 2036? Effectively the same end-point!

I am reminded of Mike Hearn's words of wisdom:

Scaling Bitcoin can only be achieved by letting it grow, and letting people tackle each bottleneck as it arises at the right times. Not by convincing ourselves that success is failure.

One less bottleneck to expect with larger blocks.

ok, we've all been lead to believe up to now that validation of tx's had to occur twice by full nodes.  first, upon receipt.  second, upon receipt of the block.  this was crucial to the FUD scare tactic of decrementing full nodes and thus "centralization" we were getting last month by the BS core devs via the "large miner w/ superior connectivity attack on small miners".  now we here about this new mechanism of "pre-validation" that allows tx's to only have to be validated once upon receipt but not necessarily on receipt of a block?

what am i missing?

[cypherdoc]

I am reminded of Mike Hearn's words of wisdom:

Scaling Bitcoin can only be achieved by letting it grow, and letting people tackle each bottleneck as it arises at the right times. Not by convincing ourselves that success is failure.

One less bottleneck to expect with larger blocks.

exactly right.

sometimes it takes a hundred steps to walk across the street.

[cypherdoc]

interesting, isn't it?

We will continue do SPV mining despite the incident, and I think so will AntPool and BTC China.

Another very good reason people should not mine on Chinese pools.  This is EXTREMELY bad for the Bitcoin network.

yes they will.  and do you blame them?  until the 1MB limit stops jacking up the unconf tx set thru either spamming or real demand, they can't be bothered to go thru the computation to order or pare down this larger than normal set.  SPV is the easiest, simplest way to get around constructing a full block that has the potential to be orphaned.

[cypherdoc]

We just need someone to figure out how to constantly feed them invalid blocks.

I'm surprised to hear this from you, Holliday.  Can you explain why you think mining on the blockheader during the short time it takes to validate the block is bad?  It is clearly the profit-maximizing strategy, and I also believe it is ethically sound (unlike replace-by-fee).  

Are they mining on the blockheader during the short time it takes to validate the block, or are they simply skipping validation entirely?

Miners are supposed to secure the network, ehh? If they are just blindly mining on whatever they are fed, they aren't doing a very good job, are they?

i think they're reacting to the larger unconf tx sets being created as a result of the 1MB cap.  they don't want to have to both verify the full blocks coming thru nor construct efficient block sizes from that set.  if the cap was lifted, the unconf tx set should drop in size as faster validating miners can swallow the large unconf sets in one gulp and stuff it into a single block to keep the size of the set down thus discouraging further spamming and the deviant SPV behavior.

[cypherdoc]

I see no problem with SPV mining while verifying the previous block. It would also make my above suggestion pointless.

Yes.

Moreover, I don't see why the time spent verifying is very significant. The vast majority of transactions would have been verified by a full node before being included in the block, and then it is just a case of checking the hash. The verification time for a block would then be insignificant relative to its download time.

Great point.  Does anyone know how Bitcoin Core currently works in this regards?  Is every transaction in a block (re-) verified?  Or are the transactions first hashed, and if matched to a TX in mempool not re-verified, thus saving time. 

but, but pwuille told us that a large block attack from a large miner would choke off small miners! 

don't forget that the top 5 largest miners in the world have inferior connectivity, not superior, like he told us.

[justusranvier]

I've learned loooooooooong ago that miners are bottom feeders who have no concept of the idea of protecting their investment.

This is a self-correcting problem.

[Peter R]

and do you blame them?

Yes, it's called cutting off the nose to spite the face. I've learned loooooooooong ago that miners are bottom feeders who have no concept of the idea of protecting their investment.

Remember, there are two issues here: SPV mining empty blocks while you're validating the previous block, and what F2Pool appeared to do that caused the problem: never getting around to actually validating the previous block at all!  

I don't see why SPV mining empty blocks for the short amount of time it takes to validate the previous block is harmful to the network's health (I think it is actually helpful).  

On the other hand, I see what F2Pool did as hurtful to the network, and they were punished accordingly with a loss of 100 BTC.