Fork off

[waaat?]

collapsing hashrate

Collapsing hashrate? The hash-rate at the last difficulty re-target (12/01) was 314,761,417 GH/s - the higher hashrate we ever had. Please point out some hard numbers (taking into account variance) that supports your "collapsing hashrate" theory.

12 minute blocks today reported by https://blockchain.info/de/stats
not 10 minute blocks

You think hash can stay up in case bitcoin continues to slump in the 100$ to 250$ ?
I see no rising demand and only rapidly rising supply.

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[Rampion]

collapsing hashrate

Collapsing hashrate? The hash-rate at the last difficulty re-target (12/01) was 314,761,417 GH/s - the higher hashrate we ever had. Please point out some hard numbers (taking into account variance) that supports your "collapsing hashrate" theory.

12 minute blocks today reported by https://blockchain.info/de/stats
not 10 minute blocks

LOL at 11.43 minutes blocks meaning a "collapse" in the hashrate.

Look at the chart below. Hashrate already "collapsed" a few times in the past. Mid 2009, end of 2011, end of 2012. So what? Bitcoin died?

[waaat?]

collapsing hashrate

Collapsing hashrate? The hash-rate at the last difficulty re-target (12/01) was 314,761,417 GH/s - the higher hashrate we ever had. Please point out some hard numbers (taking into account variance) that supports your "collapsing hashrate" theory.

12 minute blocks today reported by https://blockchain.info/de/stats
not 10 minute blocks

LOL at 11.43 minutes blocks meaning a "collapse" in the hashrate.

Look at the chart below. Hashrate already "collapsed" a few times in the past. Mid 2009, end of 2011, end of 2012. So what? Bitcoin died?

we'll talk again in 14 to 28 days ...

[Flashman]

In case you hardfork it, you hardfork it ONCE and when you have to, not twice a year when you feel like it and it appears to be 'maybe useful in the future'.

I believe the intent with raising it 20 fold is not to have to mess with it again for several years. We are on the shallow part of the adoption S curve at present, and when we hit the inflection point when true mass adoption occurs, tx volume may double several times within a year. That is not the time to be saying "Oh wait a minute everyone, just got to do a hard fork". And to go for minimal increase and have to do it more than once in that period would be suicide.

[waaat?]

In case you hardfork it, you hardfork it ONCE and when you have to, not twice a year when you feel like it and it appears to be 'maybe useful in the future'.

I believe the intent with raising it 20 fold is not to have to mess with it again for several years. We are on the shallow part of the adoption S curve at present, and when we hit the inflection point when true mass adoption occurs, tx volume may double several times within a year. That is not the time to be saying "Oh wait a minute everyone, just got to do a hard fork". And to go for minimal increase and have to do it more than once in that period would be suicide.

What 'inflection point'? Have you been looking at the charts lately? Any signs of rising demand?
No, we have to wait out the socialist distribution for the whales to corner the market and pump and dump it for the halving-party which they hopefully will so we can unload our heavy bags. That's the status quo and not hitting any imaginary 'inflection points'.

You're giving the perfect example for the dancing-in-the-sky-kind, the one telling people to hold all of 2014.
Bitcoin will remain a pump and dump - the high inflation makes sure it is.
The critical mass will be reached not within years - maybe never.
Most people already lost money with it or have been scammed and most aren't even able to use it safely. People in the streets know bitcoin and they choose not to use it. Go outside and talk to average Joe. So all the fancy hopes of massadoption is delusion and bitcoin fails miserably with being a store of value. I don't see it going up with this demand/supply imbalance and it'll be worse later because once reality sinks in sellpressure will increase even more.

The whole distribution idea was a monumental failure because it leads only to less distribution and slower adoption aswell as higher volatility (and maybe even supports centralization of mining) - but that's offtopic now.

I know the cognitive dissonance must be too much and you'll have to 'put me on ignore' now.  


bottom line: i don't see any demand for the fork now or even midterm

[Flashman]

The critical mass will be reached not within years - maybe never.

Well I don't see why you're bothering with this thread then, since from that POV neither increasing nor leaving along the block size does anything.

[danielpbarron]

In case you hardfork it, you hardfork it ONCE and when you have to, not twice a year when you feel like it and it appears to be 'maybe useful in the future'.

I believe the intent with raising it 20 fold is not to have to mess with it again for several years. We are on the shallow part of the adoption S curve at present, and when we hit the inflection point when true mass adoption occurs, tx volume may double several times within a year. That is not the time to be saying "Oh wait a minute everyone, just got to do a hard fork". And to go for minimal increase and have to do it more than once in that period would be suicide.

What 'inflection point'? Have you been looking at the charts lately? Any signs of rising demand?
No, we have to wait out the socialist distribution for the whales to corner the market and pump and dump it for the halving-party which they hopefully will so we can unload our heavy bags. That's the status quo and not hitting any imaginary 'inflection points'.

You're giving the perfect example for the dancing-in-the-sky-kind, the one telling people to hold all of 2014.
Bitcoin will remain a pump and dump - the high inflation makes sure it is.
The critical mass will be reached not within years - maybe never.
Most people already lost money with it or have been scammed and most aren't even able to use it safely. People in the streets know bitcoin and they choose not to use it. Go outside and talk to average Joe. So all the fancy hopes of massadoption is delusion and bitcoin fails miserably with being a store of value. I don't see it going up with this demand/supply imbalance and it'll be worse later because once reality sinks in sellpressure will increase even more.

The whole distribution idea was a monumental failure because it leads only to less distribution and slower adoption aswell as higher volatility (and maybe even supports centralization of mining) - but that's offtopic now.

I know the cognitive dissonance must be too much and you'll have to 'put me on ignore' now.  

I am so sick of this mentality that bitcoin somehow needs to be accepted by "average joe" or else doomed. I just saw a commercial for some iOS app that lets you pay instantly with your phone; if that's the kind of functionality you're looking for, there it is! But that's not what bitcoin is for; never has been! The purpose of bitcoin is best summarized by satoshi's choice of random data in the genesis block:

Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.

I don't need bitcoin to make buying coffee easier; I need it to stop governments from controlling money supply. That is priority number one always and forever. If you want a poorcoin that everyone can use on the cheap, that's fine; keep it separate from bitcoin. You could even back poorcoin with bitcoin. Stop thinking of bitcoin as a one-size-fits-all replacement for all money; it doesn't need to be that. It just needs to be the foundation upon which other systems of account can be built. And I don't mean that in the "build stuff on the blockchain" derpy kind of way; I mean it in the sense that it has a fixed and predictable supply from which other currencies can derive value.

[Flashman]

Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.

And from that you get "Semi fungible high limit poker chips for the elite" ? 

[phillipsjk]

Second, even with an "infinite" block-size, there are still practical limits to the size of blocks. For example, my full node (with idle token hash-power) is currently set to broadcast 500kB blocks. The reason is that my (ADSL) Bandwidth is limited to 5Mbps up. If I want to send a newly found block to 16 hosts at once, we are talking a delay of about 12.8 Seconds. With a 600 second block-time, that corresponds to an orphan rate of at least 2.1% (one hop). If I had a 1Gbps connection, and wanted to limit my orphan rate to 5%: 600x.05=30 seconds. 1Gbps*30s/(say)64 connections*8bits/byte=58.6MB Block-size (again assuming one hop). At about 300 bytes per transaction (many transactions are larger), that works out to about 195 thousand transactions per block.

Ever heard of "headers first" ?

Yes I have. All "headers first" does is save bandwidth on re-transmission. In order for other nodes to build upon your block in a trust-free manner, they still need the whole block. Edit: there is some provision for blindly trusting the header, then banning mis-behaving hosts later.

Upon review, I did make one error: when mentioning "orphan" blocks above, I was actually referring to "stale" blocks (orphan blocks have no parent that you know about).

[thelibertycap]

Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.

And from that you get "Semi fungible high limit poker chips for the elite" ? 

Its nice pokers chips. And what's wrong with us elites?

I wanted to quote satoshi as well but thought somebody has already posted it in the lengthy thread.

[oda.krell]

I just saw a commercial for some iOS app that lets you pay instantly with your phone; if that's the kind of functionality you're looking for, there it is! But that's not what bitcoin is for; never has been!

If thou treatest Satoshi's words as gospel, thou shalt at least read thy fucking white paper more carefully...


Title, abstract, and first paragraph:

A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System

peer-to-peer version of electronic cash

What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust.

Note the curious absence of mentioning Bitcoin's purpose being a 'rock solid store of wealth with the sole desire to overthrow the JEWISH SHAPESHIFTERS' & SPACE LIZARDS' FINANCIAL OLIGARCHY' - ahem - I meant to act as "semi fungible high limit poker chips". I like that one.

[davout]

Yes I have. All "headers first" does is save bandwidth on re-transmission. In order for other nodes to build upon your block in a trust-free manner, they still need the whole block. Edit: there is some provision for blindly trusting the header, then banning mis-behaving hosts later.

You are correct, it's not implemented and full blocks are required to trustlessly verify txes.

However, what I'm talking about is simply postponing the upload of the txes for the blocks you mine.
If you're a miner and can't find a way to connect the inputs of a new tx you're receiving, you just ask around for the merle branch you're interested in, or postpone inclusion of that particular transaction. And when the previous transaction comes around, you can include it.

Miners will have an incentive to push such a behavior, because it'll allow them to include more fee-paying transactions, reddit would also push it because it'd allow them to keep tipping each other bitcents onchain for a satoshi per transaction.

[tvbcof]

I wasn't following it closely (and was a little disgusted) but as I recall, all lukedashjr did was mine for a while then quite and it had a devastating impact on whatever coin it was.  Hell, the same thing could happen to Bitcoin without any attack if the price drops steeply or suddenly (but that could never happen, right?) and/or a few large clusters were molested.  I'll call this an 'Invisible hand of Adam Smith lukedashjr Attack.'  Maybe the adjustment algorithms have been patched up to preclude this, but I doubt it...such things occurring proactively seem rare in Bitcoinland.

Well, perhaps if by "mine for a while", you mean "51% the coin while excluding anyone's transactions from the mined blocks", then that would be pretty close to what happened (if I remember correctly).

I don't recall or never knew the precise details of lukedashjr's attacks.  Mining zero-length blocks does shift the financial burden on an attack funder down to just covering the transaction fees, however, in the manner I alluded to in a prior post.

I would observe that if tainting is implemented at the mining layer, mining empty blocks would be an expedient way to assure compliance, and at the margins of profitability a little bit of added efficiency goes a long way.  Not that there is much other than 'impurity' that precludes developments and adoptions which would dis-favor empty blocks though I'll admit.  (So, if we see such efforts being focused on we might raise our eyebrows...)

I also observe that the mention of the NYSE and Singapore governments becoming involved in Bitcoin provokes a response in the community akin to the VE-day celebrations (here on the allies side of things.)  Tainting would probably be a small price for the 'salvation' of mainstream involvement to most it seems, and there are plenty of people who are instinctively favorable toward existing societal norms and power structures.  By all observations Gavin seems to be among these.

With respect to tainting, it seems that there are plenty of people including long-time and high level Bitcoin participants who favor it on it's stand-alone virtues.  There are certainly some such virtues, but I see it as entirely unlikely that the effect would (or could) be 'stand-alone.'

  -edit: likely --> unlikely

[davout]

I don't recall or never knew the precise details of lukedashjr's attacks.  Mining zero-length blocks does shift the financial burden on an attack funder down to just covering the transaction fees, however, in the manner I alluded to in a prior post.

I would observe that if tainting is implemented at the mining layer, mining empty blocks would be an expedient way to assure compliance, and at the margins of profitability a little bit of added efficiency goes a long way.  Not that there is much other than 'impurity' that precludes developments and adoptions which would dis-favor empty blocks though I'll admit.  (So, if we see such efforts being focused on we might raise our eyebrows...)

I also observe that the mention of the NYSE and Singapore governments becoming involved in Bitcoin provokes a response in the community akin to the VE-day celebrations (here on the allies side of things.)  Tainting would probably be a small price for the 'salvation' of mainstream involvement to most it seems, and there are plenty of people who are instinctively favorable toward existing societal norms and power structures.  By all observations Gavin seems to be among these.

With respect to tainting, it seems that there are plenty of people including long-time and high level Bitcoin participants who favor it on it's stand-alone virtues.  There are certainly some such virtues, but I see it as entirely unlikely that the effect would (or could) be 'stand-alone.'

  -edit: likely --> unlikely

This isn't very clear so I won't comment.

Wrt to luke-jr's attack it wasn't this. He simply had the difficulty shoot up, and then left, leaving the altcoin issuing one block every X days, rendering it pretty much unusable.

[sickpig]

Thoughts from 2013 (Outside the current emo-drama) ...

http://blog.oleganza.com/post/43677417318/economics-of-block-size-limit

Can any members of the self appointed Plutocratic League for Ending Bitcoins Servicability please provide references to any post of Satoshi's that emphatically states that the block size is intended to be a hard limit? ... annnnd don't do a cut and paste cherry pick, link it so we see it in context.

He put the limit in the source code.
It's up to you to find a quote of him suggesting it'd have to be removed.

It can be phased in, like:

if (blocknumber > 115000)
    maxblocksize = largerlimit

It can start being in versions way ahead, so by the time it reaches that block number and goes into effect, the older versions that don't have it are already obsolete.

When we're near the cutoff block number, I can put an alert to old versions to make sure they know they have to upgrade.

[WindMaster]

Wrt to luke-jr's attack it wasn't this. He simply had the difficulty shoot up, and then left, leaving the altcoin issuing one block every X days, rendering it pretty much unusable.

Perhaps we're discussing different altcoins that Luke-jr has attacked.  He did 51% CoiledCoin using hashrate from Eligius to merge-mine CoiledCoin without the knowledge of the miners using his pool, and minted blocks with no transactions.  Perhaps the high-difficulty stranding you're referring to was a different alt.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=56830.0
http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3472/what-is-the-story-behind-the-attack-on-coiledcoin
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=56675.msg676981#msg676981
http://forums.microcash.org/index.php/topic/503-coiledcoin/

Different alt, same story:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=95401.0

[sickpig]

Thoughts from 2013 (Outside the current emo-drama) ...

http://blog.oleganza.com/post/43677417318/economics-of-block-size-limit

Can any members of the self appointed Plutocratic League for Ending Bitcoins Servicability please provide references to any post of Satoshi's that emphatically states that the block size is intended to be a hard limit? ... annnnd don't do a cut and paste cherry pick, link it so we see it in context.

He put the limit in the source code.
It's up to you to find a quote of him suggesting it'd have to be removed.

It can be phased in, like:

if (blocknumber > 115000)
    maxblocksize = largerlimit

It can start being in versions way ahead, so by the time it reaches that block number and goes into effect, the older versions that don't have it are already obsolete.

When we're near the cutoff block number, I can put an alert to old versions to make sure they know they have to upgrade.

@davout: In the parallel universe (a forked chain if you wish) where the failed raid 1+0  array thing didn't happen, a post ifof yours where you gave me a link to an interesting thread still exists. Such a thread should had been the proof that satoshi was not an half-god

Unluckily my memory failed to remember any details of the actual thread contents. The only thing I know was that satoshi and others were arguing about a code change.

Could you please provide me the link again? Thanks in advance.

edit: fixed typo

[ABitNut]

Thoughts from 2013 (Outside the current emo-drama) ...

http://blog.oleganza.com/post/43677417318/economics-of-block-size-limit

Can any members of the self appointed Plutocratic League for Ending Bitcoins Servicability please provide references to any post of Satoshi's that emphatically states that the block size is intended to be a hard limit? ... annnnd don't do a cut and paste cherry pick, link it so we see it in context.

He put the limit in the source code.
It's up to you to find a quote of him suggesting it'd have to be removed.

It can be phased in, like:

if (blocknumber > 115000)
    maxblocksize = largerlimit

It can start being in versions way ahead, so by the time it reaches that block number and goes into effect, the older versions that don't have it are already obsolete.

When we're near the cutoff block number, I can put an alert to old versions to make sure they know they have to upgrade.

@davout: In the parallel universe (a forked chain if you wish) where the failed raid 1+0  array thing didn't happen, a post if yours where you gave me link to an interesting thread still exists. Such a thread should had been the proof that satoshi was not an half-god

Unluckily my memory failed to remember any details of the actual thread contents. The only thing I know was that satoshi and others were arguing about a code change.

Could you please provide me the link again? Thanks in advance.

It was the discussion about adding an API method to list transactions since insert some previous transaction here. The idea is that it would be easy to get only transactions that you didn't know about yet.

Sadly the search is not working, so I can't dig up the specific thread / post anymore.

[sickpig]

@davout: In the parallel universe (a forked chain if you wish) where the failed raid 1+0  array thing didn't happen, a post if yours where you gave me link to an interesting thread still exists. Such a thread should had been the proof that satoshi was not an half-god

Unluckily my memory failed to remember any details of the actual thread contents. The only thing I know was that satoshi and others were arguing about a code change.

Could you please provide me the link again? Thanks in advance.

It was the discussion about adding an API method to list transactions since insert some previous transaction here. The idea is that it would be easy to get only transactions that you didn't know about yet.

Sadly the search is not working, so I can't dig up the specific thread / post anymore.

many thanks. I'll find it.

edit: found https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=611.msg6706#msg6706

[danielpbarron]

Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.

And from that you get "Semi fungible high limit poker chips for the elite" ? 

I get that bitcoin was not made for bailouts, but that's what's being proposed now. Gavincoin is meant to be a bailout for all the poor people who can't afford a transaction fee, and at the expense of full node operators. It's not that we want a limit for the purpose of staying "elite." It's that there have to be limits in this world. Bitcoin's ability to destroy socialism is not strengthened by the inclusion of every Tom, Dick, and Harry that has two cents to scrape together.

I just saw a commercial for some iOS app that lets you pay instantly with your phone; if that's the kind of functionality you're looking for, there it is! But that's not what bitcoin is for; never has been!

If thou treatest Satoshi's words as gospel, thou shalt at least read thy fucking white paper more carefully...


Title, abstract, and first paragraph:

A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System

peer-to-peer version of electronic cash

What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust.

Note the curious absence of mentioning Bitcoin's purpose being a 'rock solid store of wealth with the sole desire to overthrow the JEWISH SHAPESHIFTERS' & SPACE LIZARDS' FINANCIAL OLIGARCHY' - ahem - I meant to act as "semi fungible high limit poker chips". I like that one.

Also note the absence of any thing like, "all aspects of bitcoin may be compromised so that maximum adoption is achieved." Satoshi never framed this as "the fastest and bestest way to send money for all people no matter how stupid or poor they are." Your quoted texts prove my point rather than yours; we need "cryptographic proof instead of trust." When it comes to the money supply, I don't want to trust banks; I don't want to trust governments; and I certainly don't want to trust developers!