Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Erdogan]

Nick Szabo on Twitter: https://twitter.com/NickSzabo4/status/633011973634961408

"A much more reasonable block size proposal, following historical growth rates in a "limiting nutrient" resource: https://t.co/RRapcLSm6j"

Also: https://twitter.com/NickSzabo4/status/633015499316551680

"A rapid block size increase is a huge security risk: a reckless act to be performing on a $4 billion system." -- Nick Szabo

Can you ask this guy to come over and discuss it directly? Thanks.

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[Peter R]

I combined the Sickpig's idea that the block size limit is a transport limitation that crept into the consensus layer, with Smooth's observation that the Bitcoin white paper never mentions a block size limit, and rolled it into a toned-down version of the "moderators-throwing-their-swords" story:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3h73ws/the_morning_after_the_moderation_mistake_thoughts/

It looks like my post has been removed from r/bitcoin (it had 172 up-votes in 8 hours).  It was near the top of the first page, and then 5 minutes later it was nowhere to be found.  

Both cartoons by /u/raisethelimit were removed too (and one was the second highest post).

[inca]

..and all pro XT and angry censorship postings are removed from the front of /r/bitcoin. Disgraceful.

[Wexlike]

Nick Szabo on Twitter: https://twitter.com/NickSzabo4/status/633011973634961408

"A much more reasonable block size proposal, following historical growth rates in a "limiting nutrient" resource: https://t.co/RRapcLSm6j"

Also: https://twitter.com/NickSzabo4/status/633015499316551680

"A rapid block size increase is a huge security risk: a reckless act to be performing on a $4 billion system." -- Nick Szabo

Increasing the limit does not mean that blocks will be that size immediately. He doesnt really define the scales he is talking about.

Satoshi's 1mb limit was an order of magnitude greater than the average block size of the time. 5 years later we are only getting near to it. Yet there has been no talk of security risk up to this?

Without a hard block cap, a pool could send millions of small transactions(spam - with a transaction fee too low for other pools) and mine it in their own block. Thus increasing the propagation time and having a small edge on their own mining for the next block. Just a thought, that came to my head a minute ago.

Could this really cause problems in that scenario ?

Something else: it's unbelievable how much they are censoring /bitcoin.

[sAt0sHiFanClub]

..and all pro XT and angry censorship postings are removed from the front of /r/bitcoin. Disgraceful.

Indeed. They will be making "A List' next....

[Peter R]

Without a hard block cap, a pool could send millions of small transactions(spam - with a transaction fee too low for other pools) and mine it in their own block. Thus increasing the propagation time and having a small edge on their own mining for the next block. Just a thought, that came to my head a minute ago.

Could this really cause problems in that scenario ?

Publishing a large block has a cost to the miner.  I tried to illustrate this effect in Fig. 8:



Even with a propagation impedance of 2 sec/MB (which I'm confident is faster than the present network average), it still costs 1,000 BTC to produce a single 1 GB spam block.  

Indeed, you get a small head start on the next block but it won't balance out the orphan cost.  Furthermore, other miners can SPV mine on your block header (while downloading and verifying the rest of the block) to take away this advantage.

[smoothie]

439 Bitcoin XT nodes (supporting bigger blocks)     6404 Total nodes

[sickpig]

Nick Szabo on Twitter: https://twitter.com/NickSzabo4/status/633011973634961408

"A much more reasonable block size proposal, following historical growth rates in a "limiting nutrient" resource: https://t.co/RRapcLSm6j"

fwiw sipa's proposal introduce a block size increase of ~18%/year starting from 2017.
this was based on a Rusty Russell's estimate (1). it's worth noting that such estimate has been raised to 30% recently (2).

(1) http://rusty.ozlabs.org/?p=551
(2) http://rusty.ozlabs.org/?p=493

[Wexlike]

Without a hard block cap, a pool could send millions of small transactions(spam - with a transaction fee too low for other pools) and mine it in their own block. Thus increasing the propagation time and having a small edge on their own mining for the next block. Just a thought, that came to my head a minute ago.

Could this really cause problems in that scenario ?

Publishing a large block has a cost to the miner.  I tried to illustrate this effect in Fig. 8:

*skip*

Even with a propagation impedance of 2 sec/MB (which I'm confident is faster than the present network average), it still costs 1,000 BTC to produce a single 1 GB spam block.  

Indeed, you get a small head start on the next block but it won't balance out the orphan cost.  Furthermore, other miners can SPV mine on your block header (while downloading and verifying the rest of the block) to take away this advantage.

Thank you Peter, it's always a great pleasure to read your posts.
But I just don't understand the cost of 1000 BTC for a 1 GB spam block. In my example a mining pool could create the spam on their own and include the transactions in their own block, thus mining their own transaction fees. This action should cost them almost nothing. (But when mining just on the block header works without any disadvantages, then this is anyway a non issue.)

[Peter R]

Without a hard block cap, a pool could send millions of small transactions(spam - with a transaction fee too low for other pools) and mine it in their own block. Thus increasing the propagation time and having a small edge on their own mining for the next block. Just a thought, that came to my head a minute ago.

Could this really cause problems in that scenario ?

Publishing a large block has a cost to the miner.  I tried to illustrate this effect in Fig. 8:

*skip*

Even with a propagation impedance of 2 sec/MB (which I'm confident is faster than the present network average), it still costs 1,000 BTC to produce a single 1 GB spam block.  

Indeed, you get a small head start on the next block but it won't balance out the orphan cost.  Furthermore, other miners can SPV mine on your block header (while downloading and verifying the rest of the block) to take away this advantage.

Thank you Peter, it's always a great pleasure to read your posts.
But I just don't understand the cost of 1000 BTC for a 1 GB spam block. In my example a mining pool could create the spam on their own and include the transactions in their own block, thus mining their own transaction fees. This action should cost them almost nothing. (But when mining just on the block header works without any disadvantages, then this is anyway a non issue.)

It costs them 1000 BTC because, according to the laws of statistics, they would have to attempt it 40 times before one "stuck."  On average, a 1 GB block (at 2 sec/MB) will be orphaned 39 out of 40 times.  Does that make sense?

This is still true with SPV mining.  Say the other miners receive the header for my spam block slightly before they received a smaller block in full.  As soon as they receive the smaller block in full, they'll switch to mining on this one because there's a 100% chance that that block is valid while my spam block is risky because it could include an invalid TX.  

[iCEBREAKER]

If the economy splits without full consensus in either direction, then this may happen:

mircea_popescu: ben_vulpes if one block's large and the other small, all i need a tx that's included in the large block but not the small one. then doublespend it on the small one, which will be rejected necessarily by the large block blockchain.
mircea_popescu: now i have bitcoin separated in two addresses, one for each chain.
mircea_popescu: the attempt may fail, but the cost to me of this failure is not significant, so i can keep on trying until it succeeds.
mircea_popescu: the only way to guard against it is, obviously,for the ."large" chain to maintain 1:1 identity with the "small" one. because you don't just fork bitcoin.,
ben_vulpes: i still fail to see how you're going to make a txn that gets included in the large block chain and not the small block chain.
artifexd: ben_vulpes: You don't. You keep sending money to yourself until it happens.
mircea_popescu: ben_vulpes what do you mean ? it necessarily will occur.
mircea_popescu: since one contains more txn than the other by definition.
mircea_popescu: suppose i make 50k 1btc txn. they don't fit in a 1mn block. they do fit in a 10mb block. what now ?

If that happens, trouble for those on the fork and any businesses/entities that forked over without full consensus.

And the executives of any business which loses money by sticking their neck out in the first wave of XT acceptance are going to be sued into the ground by its furious shareholders.

Can you imagine explaining to your VC backers that you blew their investments in some extremely risky, easily avoided, political/ideological, e-peen measuring, nerd fight?  The corporate veil would be swiftly pierced and you would be sued personally.  You'd lose your house, and might even wind up in jail with roommates (ironically) nicknamed "Tiny" and "Little Bubba."

[Peter R]

7-1/2% and climbing. 


In other news, the guy (/u/raisethelimit) who posted the cartoons of the thermos was apparently banned for 30 days for trolling: 



https://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoin_uncensored/comments/3h8tf2/uraisethelimit_was_banned_for_30_days_for_posting/

[iCEBREAKER]

I don't see anything that XT is doing other than allowing people a choice to switch their client to one that supports bigger blocks (and a few other minor things).

Ask Frap.doc to check your eyes, since you should be able to see this:

Activating a hardfork based on what miners do is really bad. You could easily have a situation where 75% of miners support XT but none of the big Bitcoin exchanges or businesses do. Then miners would start mining coins that they couldn't spend anywhere useful, and SPV users would find that they can't transact with the businesses they want to deal with. The currency would be split, and in this case XT would be in a far weaker position than Bitcoin.

The possibility of this sort of network/currency split is what makes XT not a "legitimate hardfork", but rather the programmed creation of an altcoin. A consensus hardfork can only go forward once it has been determined that it's nearly impossible for the Bitcoin economy to split in any significant way. Not every Bitcoin user on Earth has to agree, but enough that there won't be a noticeable split.

[Wexlike]

It costs them 1000 BTC because, according to the laws of statistics, they would have to attempt it 40 times before one "stuck."  On average, a 1 GB block (at 2 sec/MB) will be orphaned 39 out of 40 times.  Does that make sense?

This is still true with SPV mining.  Say the other miners receive the header for my spam block slightly before they received a smaller block in full.  As soon as they receive the smaller block in full, they'll switch to mining on this one [/i]because there's a 100% chance that that block is valid[/i] while my spam block is risky because it could include an invalid TX.  

Thank you, that makes sense !

[iCEBREAKER]

Unbelievable. Did anyone in this environment ever destroy himself even faster than that Thermos?

Sorry, I've lost count.  Which has been declared destroyed/dooomed/dead more times, Thermos or Bitcoin?

If you don't like Thermos, why don't you fuck off his forum and sub, and go some place more welcoming of contentious/hostile/malicious/parasitic hard forks?

I hear https://voat.co/v/bitcoinxt is nice this time of year.  It's not crowded either!   

[brg444]

Without a hard block cap, a pool could send millions of small transactions(spam - with a transaction fee too low for other pools) and mine it in their own block. Thus increasing the propagation time and having a small edge on their own mining for the next block. Just a thought, that came to my head a minute ago.

Could this really cause problems in that scenario ?

Publishing a large block has a cost to the miner.  I tried to illustrate this effect in Fig. 8:

*skip*

Even with a propagation impedance of 2 sec/MB (which I'm confident is faster than the present network average), it still costs 1,000 BTC to produce a single 1 GB spam block.  

Indeed, you get a small head start on the next block but it won't balance out the orphan cost.  Furthermore, other miners can SPV mine on your block header (while downloading and verifying the rest of the block) to take away this advantage.

Thank you Peter, it's always a great pleasure to read your posts.
But I just don't understand the cost of 1000 BTC for a 1 GB spam block. In my example a mining pool could create the spam on their own and include the transactions in their own block, thus mining their own transaction fees. This action should cost them almost nothing. (But when mining just on the block header works without any disadvantages, then this is anyway a non issue.)

It costs them 1000 BTC because, according to the laws of statistics, they would have to attempt it 40 times before one "stuck."  On average, a 1 GB block (at 2 sec/MB) will be orphaned 39 out of 40 times.  Does that make sense?

This is still true with SPV mining.  Say the other miners receive the header for my spam block slightly before they received a smaller block in full.  As soon as they receive the smaller block in full, they'll switch to mining on this one because there's a 100% chance that that block is valid while my spam block is risky because it could include an invalid TX.  

I'm curious how this holds in a scenario where block propagation is constant because of inverted bloom filters?

[iCEBREAKER]

XT is using the exact same chain/protocol as core aside from the future possibility of block size increase.

XT operates just like CORE as of right now.

You keep repeating that Big Lie, but it's simply not true.

XT is every patch Mike Hearn ever had refused by NACKs in Core.

Conspicuous by its absence from the README is that incoming clearnet connections will kick a Tor peer off.

So don't just trust the description of diffs.

[iCEBREAKER]

I can understand that theymos is in a very difficult spot...

During the fall of the Berlin wall, there was a pivotal moment when the border guards finally recognised the futility of their duty, and allowed people through unchallenged.

[Erdogan]

..and all pro XT and angry censorship postings are removed from the front of /r/bitcoin. Disgraceful.

again?

[brg444]

Nick Szabo on Twitter: https://twitter.com/NickSzabo4/status/633011973634961408

"A much more reasonable block size proposal, following historical growth rates in a "limiting nutrient" resource: https://t.co/RRapcLSm6j"

Also: https://twitter.com/NickSzabo4/status/633015499316551680

"A rapid block size increase is a huge security risk: a reckless act to be performing on a $4 billion system." -- Nick Szabo

Increasing the limit does not mean that blocks will be that size immediately. He doesnt really define the scales he is talking about.

Satoshi's 1mb limit was an order of magnitude greater than the average block size of the time. 5 years later we are only getting near to it. Yet there has been no talk of security risk up to this?

It doesn't take much brains to figure out why the speed of increase of avg block has accelerated from days where Bitcoin had 10,000 users and how it projects to pickup even more speed as adoption and awareness grows.

"Supply creates its own demand"