Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[iCEBREAKER]

The purpose of anonymous speech is to to avoid adverse consequences of speaking and ensure an abstract debate of the issue's merits in a vaccuum, free from nonsense about personalities and biographies.

That is a claim that certainly can be made.

On the other hand, it is a known fact that the same technique can be weaponized:

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/

In the current environment. I'd say that the onus to prove honest dealing lies with the one using the technique.

You say we can't (usefully and without concern trolling) discuss decentralization without assigning it a number from 1 to 10 (with 20 decimals places for precision).

No. You're so far off that you aren't even wrong.

Before we can talk intelligently about decentralization:

Step 1: Define what the word means
Step 2: Establish that decentralization is, in fact, desirable, and why

I haven't seen much in the way to establish either one of those points, just a lot of begging the question by assuming that "decentralization" has a coherent and stable meaning, and that it (whatever it is) is obviously good.

I'm still not sure what you're going on about with "overcapacity", as I've never used that term.

Are you talking about well-known and understood principles of economics?

Your distrust in the marketplace of ideas is noted, so too is your reluctance to accept that truth will withstand scrutiny on its own merits as fallacy will fail on its lack of them.

I commend your extreme ("weaponized") cynicism in using Citizen Four (aka Snowden) revelations to further the anonymity-implies-something-to-hide meme you seek to promote.


During the 'stress tests, did you somehow manage to overlook Frap.doc & Co's constant, breathless declarations that the Bitcoin network was "overcapacity?"  (And thus Dooomed unless we Gavincoin ASAP, decentralization be damned.)

It's strange you would miss them, as the "overcapacity" question was/is far more pertinent/pressing than the concurrent pleasantly futile academic abstractions about decentralized angels dancing on 20MB pinheads.

All I ask is sauce for the goose be sauce for the gander.  IE:

Before we can talk intelligently about overcapacity:

Step 1: Define what the word means
Step 2: Establish that overcapacity is, in fact, undesirable, and why

I'm not sure why getting this simple point (requesting consistency in the insistence we define crypto-terms) across to you is like pulling teeth.  

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[justusranvier]

0Your distrust in the marketplace of ideas is noted, so too is your reluctance to accept that truth will withstand scrutiny on its own merits as fallacy will fail on its lack of them.

I'm done rewarding your sophism for now.

You're conveniently ignoring the reality that reading, parsing, evaluating and responding to ideas requires an expenditure of scarce resources.

When people use sockpuppets, they can increase the resource expenditure of the people they are debating without increasing their own.

Debates involving anonymous parties is highly susceptible to denial of service attacks.

A person using anonymous sockpuppets can bombard the debate with multiple, contradictory positions in a way that they wouldn't be able to get away with if they had to attach the same identity to all their arguments.

It's a bullshit way to engage in a debate of this nature, and shows a profound disrespect for the positions they argue against, as well as insulting the intelligence of everyone involved by pretending that what they're doing isn't obvious.

You are free to use all the anonymous communication you want. You don't get to force people to pay attention to what you have to say.

If you're not willing to pay an accountability price for your arguments, then don't be surprised when other people are not willing to take on the cognitive burden of paying attention to them.

[rocks]

Thermos has been down voted into the ground on reddit for his behavior.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3gdad5/meta_on_hardforking_if_bitcoin_is_so_vulnerable/ctx6rgs

In another post he claims that consensus has not been achieved simply because Greg Peter and luke Jr do not agree and that is enough to out vote Gavin and mike. How seriously fucked up is that view.

I say XT should do away with waiting for 75% now, and simply fork at some block 3 months out and let people pick the vision they want to support. In the end the ecosystem will gravitate to one winner.

[smooth]

Thermos has been down voted into the ground on reddit for his behavior.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3gdad5/meta_on_hardforking_if_bitcoin_is_so_vulnerable/ctx6rgs

In another post he claims that consensus has not been achieved simply because Greg Peter and luke Jr do not agree and that is enough to out vote Gavin and mike. How seriously fucked up is that view.

WTF???

I count two in favor, three against. How could that possible be viewed as the sort of consensus the core developers would need to act?

(I think you have the names slightly wrong, but that's not the point.)

I say XT should do away with waiting for 75% now, and simply fork at some block 3 months out and let people pick the vision they want to support. In the end the ecosystem will gravitate to one winner.

Yuck. If you're going to fork, at least fork in a clean way.

[iCEBREAKER]

Your distrust in the marketplace of ideas is noted, so too is your reluctance to accept that truth will withstand scrutiny on its own merits as fallacy will fail on its lack of them.

I'm done rewarding your sophism for now.

You're conveniently ignoring the reality that reading, parsing, evaluating and responding to ideas requires an expenditure of scarce resources.

When people use sockpuppets, they can increase the resource expenditure of the people they are debating without increasing their own.

Debates involving anonymous parties is highly susceptible to denial of service attacks.

A person using anonymous sockpuppets can bombard the debate with multiple, contradictory positions in a way that they wouldn't be able to get away with if they had to attach the same identity to all their arguments.

It's a bullshit way to engage in a debate of this nature, and shows a profound disrespect for the positions they argue against, as well as insulting the intelligence of everyone involved by pretending that what they're doing isn't obvious.

You are free to use all the anonymous communication you want. You don't get to force people to pay attention to what you have to say.

If you're not willing to pay an accountability price for your arguments, then don't be surprised when other people are not willing to take on the cognitive burden of paying attention to them.

Who said anything about let's "force people to pay attention to what you have to say?"  Nobody, that's who.  I'll take my "sophism" over your "making shit up" anyday.   

I was discussing the marketplace of ideas, and your lack of faith in its ability to reward truth and penalize fallacy.  Alone, you certainly do not have the capacity to bear the cognitive burden of dealing with "reading, parsing, evaluating and responding to" every idea in that market.  But it is easier to create new proxies (Sybil attack) than arguments, so by ignoring the particular alleged identies of the multitudes of individual messengers (instead of running ID verification/background checks on each one) we can better focus our limited resources on the general/aggregate content their messages.

Of course there are trade-offs with anonymous communication.  Satoshi, Citizenfour, and Publius demonstrate those trade-offs are ultimately desirable.

Still nothing to say about defining decentralization being prioritized higher than overcapacity?  I guess we don't need to worry about defining our crypto-terms so much after all.  Your throwaway reference to the economic (IE non-software, non-bitcoin) sense of "overcapacity" doesn't count (unless you really meant to imply any rise in tx fee indicates shortage of capacity).   

[brg444]

Thermos has been down voted into the ground on reddit for his behavior.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3gdad5/meta_on_hardforking_if_bitcoin_is_so_vulnerable/ctx6rgs

In another post he claims that consensus has not been achieved simply because Greg Peter and luke Jr do not agree and that is enough to out vote Gavin and mike. How seriously fucked up is that view.

I say XT should do away with waiting for 75% now, and simply fork at some block 3 months out and let people pick the vision they want to support. In the end the ecosystem will gravitate to one winner.

After checking he actually says "Wladamir, Greg, and Pieter are opposed to it". But yeah nice try of you to throw LukeJr in there  

PS. I expected you to be above the all too common argumentum ad populum found amongst Gavinistas.

For future reference here's a post I digged up from reddit today that sums up well the idiocy behind juvenile comments such as "Thermos has been down voted into the ground on reddit"



Oh and btw good luck and have fun with your XTcoin

[iCEBREAKER]

OH MY GAWD RAISE THE LIMIT NOW.  I CANT BREATHE AND I FEEL LIKE IM GOING TO DIEEEEE1!!1!

LUKEJR?!!?  BOOO1!!1  HISS!1! BOOOO!!11!!

Fork to XT Gavinblocks with 2% of the nodes?  Bad Idea Jeans.

https://www.reddit.com/r/xt

lol rekt

[Peter R]

Yes I do believe that it could. I believe that a major or even near-total (much less total) collapse of decentralization is a technical failure, and is a possible (and not outrageously implausible) outcome of BIP 101.

I agree that a major or near-total collapse of decentralization would be a technical failure.  

I guess we just assign very different probabilities to that happening under BIP101.  

I never stated probabilities. Unless you believe you can support that the probabilities are "outrageously implausible" (and if so based on what???) we don't necessarily disagree at all.

Furthermore, getting back to your original post, I don't agree that we "are no longer making progress". Just a few days ago you released a paper that was insightful, comprehensive on the matter of fee markets over the next 10-20 years (though to be clear that is only a portion of the overall block size debate), generally well-received, and raised new questions for follow up research. How can you say that with a major step forward having occurred only a few days ago, there is no longer any progress? Could the same be said a week or two ago, before you paper was released?

I can only imagine this perspective comes from the hubris of thinking that now that your paper is out, everyone should just shut up and get in line behind your conclusions.

I now agree that when I said "we are no longer making progress," that I was being rhetorical.  It can be difficult to catch one's self doing this; for example, a reviewer edited out rhetoric in the proof for my paper which I didn't initially even see until it was pointed out to me.

That being said, I stand by my claims that:

1. The debate is mostly ideological at this point.

2. Whether we moved forward with BIP100, BIP101, BIP102, etc., the technical risk would be very low in all cases.

I'm defining the threshold for "low technical risk" to mean that in my opinion the chance that Bitcoin fails for another reason (e.g., lack of adoption due to a reduced block size limit) is significantly greater than the risk of a technical failure (again, based on my own assessment of the probabilities).  

All things considered, I see BIP101 as the lowest risk option (and much lower risk than doing nothing), if I factor in all failure modes.    

[tvbcof]

Gold up.  Cypherdoc collapsing.

[luigi1111]

Gold up.  Cypherdoc collapsing.

It's up, but I'd rather it be down. 

[tvbcof]

Gold up.  Cypherdoc collapsing.

It's up, but I'd rather it be down. 

The house I've got on the market has not sold yet so I don't really care one way or another.  It would be nice to get one big giant push downward in PMs when I get a wad of cash which needs a home as long as the price decline was reflected in physical.

[rocks]

Thermos has been down voted into the ground on reddit for his behavior.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3gdad5/meta_on_hardforking_if_bitcoin_is_so_vulnerable/ctx6rgs

In another post he claims that consensus has not been achieved simply because Greg Peter and luke Jr do not agree and that is enough to out vote Gavin and mike. How seriously fucked up is that view.

I say XT should do away with waiting for 75% now, and simply fork at some block 3 months out and let people pick the vision they want to support. In the end the ecosystem will gravitate to one winner.

After checking he actually says "Wladamir, Greg, and Pieter are opposed to it". But yeah nice try of you to throw LukeJr in there  

PS. I expected you to be above the all too common argumentum ad populum found amongst Gavinistas.

For future reference here's a post I digged up from reddit today that sums up well the idiocy behind juvenile comments such as "Thermos has been down voted into the ground on reddit"



Oh and btw good luck and have fun with your XTcoin

OK my memory on the names was wrong, who cares, that doesn't change the point that his fundamental sentiment is that bitcoin is decided by a small group of people, which is horrible.

That post you included above is utter nonsense as a reply. Thermos being downvoted into the ground is valid to point out because it demonstrates just how much the community disagrees.

And that is the thing you don't seem to understand, bitcoin is a community defined construct, it is whatever its users want it to be. Is is not defined by a FOMC like entity.

Thank you I will enjoy my bitcoin with millions of other users, you enjoy you blockstream fork away from satoshi's vision that we all signed up for.

[laurentmt]

@Peter R: Having followed the discussion on this thread, I must say that I'm quite impressed by the work done for this paper. Bravo !
I still have to read the end of the paper but I've got a question related to the impossibility of an unhealthy fee market (chapter 7).
According to you, what would be the consequences of a new propagation mechanism like IBLT (see https://gist.github.com/gavinandresen/e20c3b5a1d4b97f79ac2) ?

[cypherdoc]

Gold up.  Cypherdoc collapsing.

tvbcof:  "woof, woof!":

[inca]

Thermos has been down voted into the ground on reddit for his behavior.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3gdad5/meta_on_hardforking_if_bitcoin_is_so_vulnerable/ctx6rgs

In another post he claims that consensus has not been achieved simply because Greg Peter and luke Jr do not agree and that is enough to out vote Gavin and mike. How seriously fucked up is that view.

I say XT should do away with waiting for 75% now, and simply fork at some block 3 months out and let people pick the vision they want to support. In the end the ecosystem will gravitate to one winner.

After checking he actually says "Wladamir, Greg, and Pieter are opposed to it". But yeah nice try of you to throw LukeJr in there  

PS. I expected you to be above the all too common argumentum ad populum found amongst Gavinistas.

For future reference here's a post I digged up from reddit today that sums up well the idiocy behind juvenile comments such as "Thermos has been down voted into the ground on reddit"



Oh and btw good luck and have fun with your XTcoin

OK my memory on the names was wrong, who cares, that doesn't change the point that his fundamental sentiment is that bitcoin is decided by a small group of people, which is horrible.

That post you included above is utter nonsense as a reply. Thermos being downvoted into the ground is valid to point out because it demonstrates just how much the community disagrees.

And that is the thing you don't seem to understand, bitcoin is a community defined construct, it is whatever its users want it to be. Is is not defined by a FOMC like entity.

Thank you I will enjoy my bitcoin with millions of other users, you enjoy you blockstream fork away from satoshi's vision that we all signed up for.

Excellent points.

Bitcoin is at an interesting impasse. I think those in favour of small blocks will force a fork of bitcoin which ironically creates a new chain which instead of becoming 'gavincoin' or 'xt coin' simply becomes bitcoin. This will render the original Core chain worthless overnight, when payment processors and exchanges etc follow the money and investment funding the ecosystem.

To average joe there probably won't be anything to even notice other than price volatility.

Either that or keeping bitcoin crippled for non-technical reasons will mark the point of decline in market capitalisation of the bitcoin chain compared with alternate chain(s). One can imagine value flowing from bitcoin to a successor which scales to the needs of the businesses and users in the ecosystem rather than a small cabal of programmers. I am reminded of the Ernest Hemingway quote about how he went bankrupt. ('Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly'.) It isn't a stretch to see a similar thing happen with bitcoin.

[klee]

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1064374.msg12105991#msg12105991

Can someone do the same for Bitcoin??

[Wexlike]

Thermos has been down voted into the ground on reddit for his behavior.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3gdad5/meta_on_hardforking_if_bitcoin_is_so_vulnerable/ctx6rgs

In another post he claims that consensus has not been achieved simply because Greg Peter and luke Jr do not agree and that is enough to out vote Gavin and mike. How seriously fucked up is that view.

I say XT should do away with waiting for 75% now, and simply fork at some block 3 months out and let people pick the vision they want to support. In the end the ecosystem will gravitate to one winner.

After checking he actually says "Wladamir, Greg, and Pieter are opposed to it". But yeah nice try of you to throw LukeJr in there  

PS. I expected you to be above the all too common argumentum ad populum found amongst Gavinistas.

For future reference here's a post I digged up from reddit today that sums up well the idiocy behind juvenile comments such as "Thermos has been down voted into the ground on reddit"



Oh and btw good luck and have fun with your XTcoin

OK my memory on the names was wrong, who cares, that doesn't change the point that his fundamental sentiment is that bitcoin is decided by a small group of people, which is horrible.

That post you included above is utter nonsense as a reply. Thermos being downvoted into the ground is valid to point out because it demonstrates just how much the community disagrees.

And that is the thing you don't seem to understand, bitcoin is a community defined construct, it is whatever its users want it to be. Is is not defined by a FOMC like entity.

Thank you I will enjoy my bitcoin with millions of other users, you enjoy you blockstream fork away from satoshi's vision that we all signed up for.

Excellent points.

Bitcoin is at an interesting impasse. I think those in favour of small blocks will force a fork of bitcoin which ironically creates a new chain which instead of becoming 'gavincoin' or 'xt coin' simply becomes bitcoin. This will render the original Core chain worthless overnight, when payment processors and exchanges etc follow the money and investment funding the ecosystem.

To average joe there probably won't be anything to even notice other than price volatility.

Either that or keeping bitcoin crippled for non-technical reasons will mark the point of decline in market capitalisation of the bitcoin chain compared with alternate chain(s). One can imagine value flowing from bitcoin to a successor which scales to the needs of the businesses and users in the ecosystem rather than a small cabal of programmers. I am reminded of the Ernest Hemingway quote about how he went bankrupt. ('Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly'.) It isn't a stretch to see a similar thing happen with bitcoin.

Well, i upgraded my node to XT. That is how you vote in a decentralized system.

[Peter R]

@Peter R: Having followed the discussion on this thread, I must say that I'm quite impressed by the work done for this paper. Bravo !
I still have to read the end of the paper but I've got a question related to the impossibility of an unhealthy fee market (chapter 7).
According to you, what would be the consequences of a new propagation mechanism like IBLT (see https://gist.github.com/gavinandresen/e20c3b5a1d4b97f79ac2) ?

Great question.  

There's two cases to consider: (1) how an IBLT propagation mechanism will affect spam costs for an attacker, and (2) how it will affect the health of the fee market in general.  

1. IBLT will make spam proportionally more costly for an attacker, since the propagation efficiency of IBLT relies on partially synchronized mempools.  There's more on this here.

2. The paper viewed the IBLT scheme as a way to compress block solutions by some factor γ, where γ represents the coding gain. In this regard, it is similar to the compression already achieved by the Corallo Relay Network, only with a higher coding gain.  Assuming that block solutions are propagated across physical channels, and that the quantity of pure information communicated per solution is proportional to the amount of information contained within the block, then the communication time will always grow asymptotically like O(Q) as per the Shannon-Hartley theorem, and the fee market will be healthy.  In other words, as long as the block solutions contain information in the sense defined by Shannon (also called the Shannon Entropy) about the transactions they contain, then bigger blocks will contain more of it and, by the Shannon-Hartley Carrying Capacity Theorem, the communication speed has a fundamental lower bound governed by the laws of physics.

So to answer your question, my view is that IBLT would not affect the health of the fee market (but it would reduce the average fee per transaction).

This discussion relates to my main point of contention with Greg Maxwell.  In email correspondence, he suggested that it would be possible to have infinite coding gain for block solutions announcement. (I.e., he suggested that block solutions can truly be communicated in an amount of time that does not depend, even asymptotically, on the amount of transactions included in the block.  He said this is possible if what went into a block was already agreed upon far ahead of time [so that zero information needed to be communicated when the block was solved]).  I think the onus is on him to rigorously show:

(a) Under what assumptions/requirements such a communication scheme is physically possible.

(b) That such a configuration is not equivalent to a single entity¹ controlling >50% of the hash power.

(c) That the network moving into such a configuration is plausible.

Nevertheless, I've agreed with him to discuss this point of contention when I make the other corrections to my paper.  

¹For example, if--in order to achieve such a configuration with infinite coding gain--miners can no longer choose how to structure their blocks according to their own volition, then I would classify those miners as slaves rather than as peers, and the network as already centralized.

[tvbcof]

Gold up.  Cypherdoc collapsing.

tvbcof:  "woof, woof!":

I thought for a minute that you may have figured out the incredibly complex technology required to make your images appropriately sized for your post (hint:  width={nnn} within the opening img tag.)  Guess not.

[brg444]

That post you included above is utter nonsense as a reply. Thermos being downvoted into the ground is valid to point out because it demonstrates just how much the community disagrees.

And that is the thing you don't seem to understand, bitcoin is a community defined construct, it is whatever its users want it to be. Is is not defined by a FOMC like entity.

poor guy.. you are even more naive than I thought.

the point YOU (and quite a few here) dont seem to understand is that the reddit mob in no way, shape or form defines "the community".

if there is a consensus amongst anyone with half a brain it is that no sane discussions on the topic of the block size debate can be had over there. The post I included explain exactly while it is so.

now you can keep fooling yourself with delusions of community consensus or get a grip and realise that no amount of upvotes or downvotes will shift the balance in the outcome of this issue.