Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[justusranvier]

I question the need for new messages to help SPV clients find the right path because 1) they seem exploitable to me and 2) all they need is the header chain to find the right path and headers are already short and fast to transmit. Waiting for x blocks again seems to protect them if you assume a majority of well connected miners.

This is a far weaker security model that what is achievable.

If you can point a way to exploit this technique, I'd appreciate having it pointed out:

https://gist.github.com/justusranvier/451616fa4697b5f25f60

[1715018791]

1715018791

[1715018791]

1715018791

[cypherdoc]

going UP:

[rocks]

Have you guys seen this, a DAC gambling/prediction engine built on top of Ethereum

http://reason.com/blog/2015/08/11/augur-gambling-prediction-ethereum

I think this is the first example of a true DAC out in the wild that I've seen. Bitcoin still hasn't even gotten started yet.

Edit: the reason folks are solid libertarians but most of them still don't get bitcoin.

[jmw74]

I question the need for new messages to help SPV clients find the right path because 1) they seem exploitable to me and 2) all they need is the header chain to find the right path and headers are already short and fast to transmit. Waiting for x blocks again seems to protect them if you assume a majority of well connected miners.

This is a far weaker security model that what is achievable.

If you can point a way to exploit this technique, I'd appreciate having it pointed out:

https://gist.github.com/justusranvier/451616fa4697b5f25f60

I'm a bit shocked that no one is talking about this idea.

It would greatly increase the security (and hence the value) of SPV clients and allow far greater scaling with almost no sacrifice in security.

[cypherdoc]

market responding well to the arrival of XT!  iCEBLOW & co is going to get blown away:

[rocks]

I question the need for new messages to help SPV clients find the right path because 1) they seem exploitable to me and 2) all they need is the header chain to find the right path and headers are already short and fast to transmit. Waiting for x blocks again seems to protect them if you assume a majority of well connected miners.

This is a far weaker security model that what is achievable.

If you can point a way to exploit this technique, I'd appreciate having it pointed out:

https://gist.github.com/justusranvier/451616fa4697b5f25f60

I guess I'm just expressing the opinion that the current header based proof if work mechanism is working fine so far and is difficult to exploit. I'll take a look when I have time (but you're a smart guy so I'm sure the solution is strong). Its just that in this instance I'm not sure we have a problem yet, and I'm starting to take a if its not broke why fix it view largely out of fear that an unneeded change might have adverse unknown consequences (but maybe we will someday and so its very useful to have solutions ready)

[justusranvier]

I'm a bit shocked that no one is talking about this idea.

It would greatly increase the security (and hence the value) of SPV clients and allow far greater scaling with almost no sacrifice in security.

A pessimistic explanation would be that maybe nobody actually wants solutions to any of Bitcoin's problems. They just want to have problems to point to as excuses for furthering one agenda or another.

[cypherdoc]

2 1/2 yrs later after my newsletter post on this:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/silicon-valley-going-wall-street-171001127.html

[Erdogan]

It is resolved. We won. The devil lost.

[thezerg]

this sounds exactly like something i'd say:
The Blockstream Business Plan (self.Bitcoin)
submitted an hour ago * by Celean

And if this is true Blockstream is making a HUGE mistake.  I don't think many people are doing multiple txns per day, every day right now.  I don't even think many people do 1 txn per week.  I doubt that people will be willing to sequester coins into the LN for significant periods (no I have no facts to back up this intuition).  

So I don't think that the lightning network solves the problem we have today which is getting people to do their FIRST txn (expand the network) and then getting them to use it periodically (use encourages merchants to accept it).

Once people are using BTC a couple times per day, LN is becomes very valuable.  Its actually WORSE if you do just one txn in a payment channel (it takes 2 blockchain txns instead of 1).

So LN won't actually solve the typical use pattern today.  And if that pattern is forced to pay high fees people will choose other payment options stagnating Bitcoin growth (or best case transforms into low velocity digital gold) to the point where we'll never need the volumes LN can offer.

[cypherdoc]

this sounds exactly like something i'd say:
The Blockstream Business Plan (self.Bitcoin)
submitted an hour ago * by Celean

And if this is true Blockstream is making a HUGE mistake.  I don't think many people are doing multiple txns per day, every day right now.  I don't even think many people do 1 txn per week.  I doubt that people will be willing to sequester coins into the LN for significant periods (no I have no facts to back up this intuition).  

So I don't think that the lightning network solves the problem we have today which is getting people to do their FIRST txn (expand the network) and then getting them to use it periodically (use encourages merchants to accept it).

Once people are using BTC a couple times per day, LN is becomes very valuable.  Its actually WORSE if you do just one txn in a payment channel (it takes 2 blockchain txns instead of 1).

So LN won't actually solve the typical use pattern today.  And if that pattern is forced to pay high fees people will choose other payment options stagnating Bitcoin growth (or best case transforms into low velocity digital gold) to the point where we'll never need the volumes LN can offer.

it was never about practicality or common sense.  let alone fairness. 

it was about greed.

[iCEBREAKER]

It appears now that the reddit post proving censorship of the now "uncensored" reddit post (44% of hash power supports 8 MB) has itself been censored:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3gm3ww/this_thread_was_removedhidden_from_front_page/

Just to clear things up, that thread wasn't removed by a moderator, I removed it to address some factual inaccuracies and add some additional sources. It is now reposted.

So much for thermos being the "epitome of authoritarianism" and ready to start "book burnings."   

If you and the toxic Redditards (eg Frap.doc) could learn the diff between moderation and censorship, that would be great.

XTnodes = 3%

Wow, very disruption.  Such revolutionary!

[cypherdoc]

Big middle finger to iCEBLOW, brg444, tvbcof, and MOA:

[iCEBREAKER]

it was never about practicality or common sense.  let alone fairness. 

it was about greed.

Attacking what you imagine to be people's motivations is easy.

Refuting the actual computer science and game theory is hard:

I'm not sure if you are aware of the centralization pressure that occurs when miners are allowed to pick their own block sizes. Miners have incentives to encourage a very high orphan rate, if the orphan rate is properly targeted. Mining is a 0-sum game, which means that miners have incentive to hurt eachother. (less competition means lower difficulty and more blocks for you).

The ideal scenario for a miner is that the block they produce immediately hits a large portion of the hash power (at least 51%, but I'm not sure what the optimal percentage is), and then never hits the remaining hashpower at all. That remaining hashpower will have to find 2 blocks before the rest of the hashpower finds a single block - this will be detrimental to the profits of the minority hashpower, significantly so.

Large blocks provide a way to achieve this to some effect for bigger miners....

...This attack can be levied by a single large miner with no collusion. Simply by prioritizing the other large miners, and refusing to send the block to the low-bandwidth minority, a big miner can create blocks large enough to heavily impact the orphan rate of smaller miners without significantly affecting their own orphan rate.

This is very bad. The block size limit is important to stop this class of attack.

The vast majority of research demonstrates that blocksize does matter, blocksize caps are required to secure the network, and large blocks are a centralizing pressure.

Here’s a short list of what has been published so far:

1) No blocksize cap and no minimum fee leads to catastrophic breakage as miners chase marginal 0 fees:

    http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2400519

It’s important to note that mandatory minimum fees could simply be rebated out-of-band, which would lead to the same problems.

2) a) Large mining pools make strategies other than honest mining more profitable:

    http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~ie53/publications/btcProcArXiv.pdf

2) b) In the presence of latency, some alternative selfish strategy exists that is more profitable at any mining pool size. The larger the latency, the greater the selfish mining benefit:

    http://arxiv.org/pdf/1507.06183v1.pdf

3) Mining simulations run by Pieter Wuille shows that well-connected peers making a majority of the hashing power have an advantage over less-connected ones, earning more profits per hash. Larger blocks even further favor these well-connected peers. This gets even worse as we shift from block subsidy to fee based reward :

    http://www.mail-archive.com/bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net/msg08161.html

4) Other point(s):

If there is no blocksize cap, a miner should simply snipe the fees from the latest block and try to stale that block by mining their own replacement. You get all the fees plus any more from new transactions. Full blocks gives less reward for doing so, since you have to choose which transactions to include. https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3fpuld/a_transaction_fee_market_exists_without_a_block/ctqxkq6

[brg444]

Big middle finger to iCEBLOW, brg444, tvbcof, and MOA:

you still playing that game where you pretend any random thing that suits your delusions is confirmed true if price goes up  

maybe you should move away from the keyboard forever then, we had a nice little rally that time you went camping or w/e

[cypherdoc]

it was never about practicality or common sense.  let alone fairness.  

it was about greed.

Attacking what you imagine to be people's motivations is easy.

Refuting the actual computer science and game theory is hard:

I'm not sure if you are aware of the centralization pressure that occurs when miners are allowed to pick their own block sizes. Miners have incentives to encourage a very high orphan rate, if the orphan rate is properly targeted. Mining is a 0-sum game, which means that miners have incentive to hurt eachother. (less competition means lower difficulty and more blocks for you).

note the non-technical assumption that idiot makes in his post upon which he bases all his technical mis-steps.  he's wrong.  where Bitcoin XT is headed, there's a big enough pie to bring every miner currently involved in the space along for the ride.  and the miners know this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=or65M4Ht4Kk

[Peter R]

It appears now that the reddit post proving censorship of the now "uncensored" reddit post (44% of hash power supports 8 MB) has itself been censored:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3gm3ww/this_thread_was_removedhidden_from_front_page/

Just to clear things up, that thread wasn't removed by a moderator, I removed it to address some factual inaccuracies and add some additional sources. It is now reposted.

So much for thermos being the "epitome of authoritarianism" and ready to start "book burnings."   

You're referring to a totally different post that was deleted by the author (the one about the Blockstream Business Plan).  Just look three comments up:

[awemany]

[...]

So I don't think that the lightning network solves the problem we have today which is getting people to do their FIRST txn (expand the network) and then getting them to use it periodically (use encourages merchants to accept it).

Once people are using BTC a couple times per day, LN is becomes very valuable.  Its actually WORSE if you do just one txn in a payment channel (it takes 2 blockchain txns instead of 1).

So LN won't actually solve the typical use pattern today.  And if that pattern is forced to pay high fees people will choose other payment options stagnating Bitcoin growth (or best case transforms into low velocity digital gold) to the point where we'll never need the volumes LN can offer.

This is actually a great argument! I think you are completely 100% correct here, but to have another strong case for the blocksize increase, what we would need to have here is some data on actual usage patterns of Bitcoin to support this argument.

Did someone already extract 'typical spending patterns' vs. 'typical investment patterns' from the Blockchain?

[Peter R]

[...]

So I don't think that the lightning network solves the problem we have today which is getting people to do their FIRST txn (expand the network) and then getting them to use it periodically (use encourages merchants to accept it).

Once people are using BTC a couple times per day, LN is becomes very valuable.  Its actually WORSE if you do just one txn in a payment channel (it takes 2 blockchain txns instead of 1).

So LN won't actually solve the typical use pattern today.  And if that pattern is forced to pay high fees people will choose other payment options stagnating Bitcoin growth (or best case transforms into low velocity digital gold) to the point where we'll never need the volumes LN can offer.

This is actually a great argument!
…

+2.  Yes, it is a great argument thezerg!

[cypherdoc]

this sounds exactly like something i'd say:

The Blockstream Business Plan (self.Bitcoin)-

what is really going on here is that Blockstream wants to shift the long term miner tx fees away from the mainchain into SC & LN tx fees paid to their federated nodes, LN gateways, & consulting fees for SC's.