Bitcoin 20MB Fork

[RoadStress]

You are so despicable. Those people can just use a 3rd party shared wallet if they are so disinterested in actually keeping a full copy of the ledger. What is the difference from their point of view? Whereas the difference from your point of view is clear: your handlers want the full ledger to be as centralized as possible so that maybe they can corrupt it!

Are you suggesting that people are better off with their private keys handed off to a 3rd party just because they do not want to keep a full copy of the ledger?

@sed Just ignore troll Icetard. Check my signature. Nothing good has ever come out of his mouth.

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[davout]

What you are missing it that if the fork is actually made, blocks compatible with the 20 MB fork only will come after 75% of the nodes have announced themselves that they will be ready for the fork. So, either this happens and it's more profitable to mine on the 20 MB chain, or this doesn't happen and nobody will be mining on the 20 MB chain.

First of all, the prices can start diverging before the fork actually happens. The economic resolution will probably not need an actual fork to happen.

In addition to that, even if only 25% of miners remain on bitcoin at first, there will still be one block every 40 minutes, and one block every 13 minutes and 20 seconds on the 75% chain which seems more than enough to get some trading going on.

Now, in addition to this, you could perfectly imagine that some miners decided to broadcast v4-tagged blocks before the fork, for the sole purpose of inflating the gavincoin/bitcoin rate, with no intention of actually honoring the hard-fork. By doing this they would lead unsuspecting bagholders to sell more bitcoin for gavincoin than they would have otherwise. If this happens, god help you, you'll think you'll have 75% of the miner support, but when the hard fork comes you'll find all this hashrate disappearing from under your feet and supporting the other chain...

"We heard you like market manipulation, so we put some market manipulation in your market manipulation..."

[DooMAD]

Blah, blah, blah, more nonsense to make people think the fork is bad because I'm so desperate not to get left behind and I know my preferred chain is the weaker one.

EFT.

They claim that their 1MB chain will end up superior and yet they keep pleading page after page for us to stick around and not leave them behind.  Doesn't sound like they have much confidence in their words.  One way or another, the forward momentum will carry on. 

[danielpbarron]

I've asked MP. While nobody can really know the future, turns out what we'll likely do is start an entirely new coin, this time guaranteed to never be hard-forked; not by a bunch of coder nobodies, but by MP himself. In practice that'll most likely work out to simply staying with the old version and replacing some code monkeys. This, mind you, not because we really care all that much if it's 1 Mb or 100 Gb, but because the precedent of hardforking "for change" is intolerable. We'll find ourselves in due time under a lot more pressure to fuck up Bitcoin than some vague "I can't manage to envision the future" sort of bs.

[my bold emphasis]

The reality of MP's position is that he does not want Bitcoin changed, which is why he runs an old version of Bitcoin Core, and has drawn a red line at the 1MB fork. He doesn't really care if the block limit is 1MB or 100GB, it's the principle of changing Bitcoin without MP's permission, which is unacceptable.

This is correct. This is indeed the crux of the issue, and I have not kept it a secret. I want bitcoin to remain anti-socialism, and MP wants the same. USGavin wants to change bitcoin so that socialism continues to be a thing. So yes, this is the "red line."

I'm not against changing it, so long as changes are in accordance with the aforementioned terms. For example, the bitcoin foundation is currently cleaning up the mess of a code base with which satoshi left us. There is talk of re-writing the whole thing in ADA, a language typically used on airplanes. If bitcoin is ever to get serious investment, it needs to be written correctly and not depend on garbage like OpenSSL. Things like changing magic numbers should only ever be considerations in the event of catastrophic failure of the network. And right now, MP is the only one in a position to decide if such a failure has occurred as his exchange is what's keeping the whole thing going. It's because of MPEx that your coins even have value; it's because of MPEx that there is any semblance of "correct price" in the rest of the market. All purchases made in bitcoin must be measured against what gains the funds could have made if deposited on MPEx.

Why is it MPEx that sets the standard for bitcoin? Because MPEx will not be pushed around by the USG. MP has firmly established his exchange as the safe place to keep your assets; the place where governments cannot interfere and taxes cannot be imposed. These are the things that bitcoin is about. This is why if you aren't in the WoT, you aren't in bitcoin. And this is why the guy who works with the CIA is the same guy who wants to change bitcoin.

You are so despicable. Those people can just use a 3rd party shared wallet if they are so disinterested in actually keeping a full copy of the ledger. What is the difference from their point of view? Whereas the difference from your point of view is clear: your handlers want the full ledger to be as centralized as possible so that maybe they can corrupt it!

Are you suggesting that people are better off with their private keys handed off to a 3rd party just because they do not want to keep a full copy of the ledger?

Yes! I am pointing out that there is little difference. If you do not validate the transactions, you might as well not have the keys. If the unwashed masses aren't to have the "full" experience no matter the circumstances, I would much prefer that fully validating nodes remain inexpensive. If you can't have the keys to your funds, you can at least verify that your local bank has the funds they claim to hold on your behalf, and that the world's money supply is in fact what it should be. It is not worth having the keys to a network that can easily be corrupted by whoever has the most access to bandwidth. The whole point of bitcoin is that it can laugh off any and all attacks launched against it.

[RoadStress]

Are you suggesting that people are better off with their private keys handed off to a 3rd party just because they do not want to keep a full copy of the ledger?

Yes! I am pointing out that there is little difference. If you do not validate the transactions, you might as well not have the keys.

Stop imposing your stupid views. Why should you or your boss MP decide that if users do not validate the transactions they shouldn't keep their private keys?

So you are against centralized nodes which can be very easily white or black listed, but you are pro trusting private keys to a 3rd party. BEST RETARD ADVISE. You should get a Darwin award for this stupidity which you just vomited. Really!

[danielpbarron]

Are you suggesting that people are better off with their private keys handed off to a 3rd party just because they do not want to keep a full copy of the ledger?

Yes! I am pointing out that there is little difference. If you do not validate the transactions, you might as well not have the keys.

Stop imposing your stupid views. Why should you or your boss MP decide that if users do not validate the transactions they shouldn't keep their private keys?

So you are against centralized nodes which can be very easily white or black listed, but you are pro trusting private keys to a 3rd party. BEST RETARD ADVISE. You should get a Darwin award for this stupidity which you just vomited. Really!

I have refuted your objections on another thread. Attached is that refutation.

So now you are trying to force every bitcoin user to have a full node? Just like every webpage visitor has a full server in his house? Satoshi never visioned such a world. He stated that the full nodes will be centralized and that people will use Light clients. Why are you trying to impose YOUR point of view on everyone else? Why don't you let everyone to decide if they are ok with centralized nodes or not? Why do you think that there will not be some kind of trusted full nodes service where people can whitelist and blacklist centralized nodes? Stop trying to limit stuff and stop being MP dog who just follows orders!

If you aren't running a full node, you aren't using bitcoin! That's not me "forcing" anything; it's just a fact. The more apt analogy is gold backed paper currency -- those handling the physical gold are like the full node operators, and those who just pass around paper bills are like the thin client users. It's not inherently wrong to use the bills rather than the metal, but the system shouldn't be crafted around the paper. Your suggestion is that I shouldn't mind that all the gold be stored in a few "trusted" warehouses rather than dispersed throughout the world in many different locations. You seem to gloss over the fact that your level of trust with the nodes isn't the issue; it's that there being few of them makes it trivial for a government to seize the whole thing. Was the demise of the Liberty Dollar due to a lack of trust from his clients? No. It was because a rouge state stole his assets and arrested him.

For what it's worth, MP has not "ordered" me to do anything. I waste my time on the forums against his recommendation. I can't find it in the logs, but I recall asking him if I should post here and him responding in the negative. How about you stop "limiting stuff" to what some bad programmer said and stop following the orders of UnSavoryGarnish.

[RoadStress]

I have refuted your objections on another thread. Attached is that refutation.
...

All I can say for now is wow! You will need to wait for a reply. Once I'll stop laughing about the amount of WRONG in that reply I will try to refute you back and your abjection!

[RoadStress]

I have refuted your objections on another thread. Attached is that refutation.
...

Answered: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=252937.msg10817468#msg10817468

In addition let me tell you that by suggesting the use of a 3rd party wallet is simply denying one of the most important features of Bitcoin. The ability to keep your money and to be your own bank. Just because you can't afford to keep one computer plugged 24 hours per day. This must be one of the most stupidest ideas that I've seen on this forum.

Please enlighten us more with your stupidity!

[hdbuck]

news from buddy meeting with andrea: 'firm fork' to be effective within 6 months.

[Snagglebone]

Finally a reasonable question:

Gavin, could you please explain the reason behind trying to guess and hard-code the optimal limit, instead of doing something adaptive, like "limit = median(size of last N blocks) * 10"?

The problem people are worried about if the maximum block size is too high:  That big miners with high-bandwidth, high-CPU machines will drive out either small miners or I-want-to-run-a-full-node-at-home people by producing blocks too large for them to download or verify quickly.

An adaptive limit could be set so that some minority of miners can 'veto' block size increases; that'd be fine with me.

But it wouldn't help with "I want to be able to run a full node from my home computer / network connection." Does anybody actually care about that? Satoshi didn't, his vision was home users running SPV nodes and full nodes being hosted in datacenters.

I haven't looked at the numbers, but I'd bet the number of personal computers in homes is declining or will soon be declining-- being replaced by smartphones and tablets. So I'd be happy to drop the "must be able to run at home" requirement and just go with an adaptive algorithm. Doing both is also possible, of course, but I don't like extra complexity if it can be helped.

It is hard to tease out which problem people care about, because most people haven't thought much about the block size and confuse the current pain of downloading the chain initially (pretty easily fixed by getting the current UTXO set from somebody), the current pain of dedicating tens of gigabytes of disk space to the chain (fixed by pruning old, spent blocks and transactions), and slow block propagation times (fixed by improving the code and p2p protocol).


PS: my apologies to davout for misremembering his testnet work.

PPS: I am always open to well-thought-out alternative ideas. If there is a simple, well-thought-out proposal for an adaptive blocksize increase, please point me to it.

I don't think we are going to see the number of PCs in homes go down anytime soon... the trend is upwards. What you will see is those without PCs now increasing the numbers of lightweight PCs, such as tablets, phones, etc... in their homes as their primary means of computing. I don't think you can use the argument that the number of computers capable of running a full node will be declining, because if it ever does, it won't be any time soon. We will have a problem with the block limit long before that is even a minor disturbance in the force. For the record, I agree with you completely that we need to increase the block size limit, I just don't agree that the number of PCs is a valid reason. The adaptive algorithm is good, but it seems that it could potentially be exploited given enough resources, but it might be the lesser of two evils at the moment.

Satoshi also envisioned ASICs dominating the network and being run in a more centralized manner, but many people forget that as well. Centralization is not necessarily a bad thing, depending on the circumstances and if that centralization can be counterbalanced with the ability to quickly and decisively eliminate the negative forces of centralization, then I think that outweighs the risks.

[iGotSpots]

Finally a reasonable question:

Gavin, could you please explain the reason behind trying to guess and hard-code the optimal limit, instead of doing something adaptive, like "limit = median(size of last N blocks) * 10"?

The problem people are worried about if the maximum block size is too high:  That big miners with high-bandwidth, high-CPU machines will drive out either small miners or I-want-to-run-a-full-node-at-home people by producing blocks too large for them to download or verify quickly.

An adaptive limit could be set so that some minority of miners can 'veto' block size increases; that'd be fine with me.

But it wouldn't help with "I want to be able to run a full node from my home computer / network connection." Does anybody actually care about that? Satoshi didn't, his vision was home users running SPV nodes and full nodes being hosted in datacenters.

I haven't looked at the numbers, but I'd bet the number of personal computers in homes is declining or will soon be declining-- being replaced by smartphones and tablets. So I'd be happy to drop the "must be able to run at home" requirement and just go with an adaptive algorithm. Doing both is also possible, of course, but I don't like extra complexity if it can be helped.

It is hard to tease out which problem people care about, because most people haven't thought much about the block size and confuse the current pain of downloading the chain initially (pretty easily fixed by getting the current UTXO set from somebody), the current pain of dedicating tens of gigabytes of disk space to the chain (fixed by pruning old, spent blocks and transactions), and slow block propagation times (fixed by improving the code and p2p protocol).


PS: my apologies to davout for misremembering his testnet work.

PPS: I am always open to well-thought-out alternative ideas. If there is a simple, well-thought-out proposal for an adaptive blocksize increase, please point me to it.

I don't think a response to this can be much worse than what was just written. Possibly the most narrow-minded solution ever. I suppose you like to put bandaids on gunshots, too; both are equally as stupid

[RoadStress]

I don't think a response to this can be much worse than what was just written. Possibly the most narrow-minded solution ever. I suppose you like to put bandaids on gunshots, too; both are equally as stupid

What are your solutions?

[iGotSpots]

I don't think a response to this can be much worse than what was just written. Possibly the most narrow-minded solution ever. I suppose you like to put bandaids on gunshots, too; both are equally as stupid

What are your solutions?

Definitely not to squeeze out home users. All that will do is put the burden onto corporations that are dumping it straight to fiat to pay employees and bills

[RoadStress]

Definitely not to squeeze out home users. All that will do is put the burden onto corporations that are dumping it straight to fiat to pay employees and bills

But it's ok to squeeze out the businesses that need a higher block limit? The businesses that actually help Bitcoin ecosystem grow?

[danielpbarron]

In addition let me tell you that by suggesting the use of a 3rd party wallet is simply denying one of the most important features of Bitcoin. The ability to keep your money and to be your own bank. Just because you can't afford to keep one computer plugged 24 hours per day. This must be one of the most stupidest ideas that I've seen on this forum.

How are you "your own bank" without actually having the banking software?? A private key does not a bank make! I can generate all sorts of keys and sign all sorts of messages; that doesn't mean I have money! The "most important feature" of bitcoin is the block chain: the full history of transactions and coin bases. Without this, your signed messages and private keys are for naught.

I don't think you can use the argument that the number of computers capable of running a full node will be declining, because if it ever does, it won't be any time soon.

This is false; the number is already shockingly low. It can only get lower with an increase in the cost of maintaining a node.

Satoshi also envisioned ASICs dominating the network and being run in a more centralized manner, but many people forget that as well. Centralization is not necessarily a bad thing, depending on the circumstances and if that centralization can be counterbalanced with the ability to quickly and decisively eliminate the negative forces of centralization, then I think that outweighs the risks.

This is false as wellⁱ. Sure, many things benefit from centralizationⁱⁱ, but the money supply is not one of them. And then you go on to say something that doesn't make sense.. What is the "counterbalance" to "quickly and decisively eliminate the negative forces of centralization?" You say this but fail to explain it. I see the risk in centralizing the full nodes; I don't see any benefit to it, especially when the same effect can be achieved via off-chain solutions that do not compromise the security of the network as a whole.


i : Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System

The proof-of-work also solves the problem of determining representation in majority decision
making. If the majority were based on one-IP-address-one-vote, it could be subverted by anyone
able to allocate many IPs. Proof-of-work is essentially one-CPU-one-vote.

ii : In which we discuss Datskovskiy's discussion of MPEx

Just so is the case with Bitcoins and markets : it makes perfect sense for the currency itself to be decentralized. It makes absolutely no sense at all for the marketplace to be decentralized. In fact, a decentralized market is about as much a market as a deenginized car is a car. The market is precisely where economic agents come together, that's what it does, it centralizes trade. Further, it is sensible for the currency itself to be as trustless as possible, and thus mechanisms that implement trustlessness are a net gain in that field. A market can never exist at all without trust, and so mechanisms that purportedly implement "trustlessness" are nothing but clunk in this field.

[RoadStress]

How are you "your own bank" without actually having the banking software?? A private key does not a bank make! I can generate all sorts of keys and sign all sorts of messages; that doesn't mean I have money! The "most important feature" of bitcoin is the block chain: the full history of transactions and coin bases. Without this, your signed messages and private keys are for naught.

If they can transmit transactions with a light client it's equal to having the banking software to me.Maybe I got it wrong but I know that nobody can spend your money without having the private key. A private key kept private makes it impossible for anyone else to spend your money.

You do know that your logic is faulty. You do not have a web server at your home to download or use stuff from the Internet or from your mobile banking system. This is stupid and utopic and it will never happen!

[waaat?]

i gather: Vertcoin to the moon!

[Snagglebone]

I don't think you can use the argument that the number of computers capable of running a full node will be declining, because if it ever does, it won't be any time soon.

This is false; the number is already shockingly low. It can only get lower with an increase in the cost of maintaining a node.

I said nothing about the number of full bitcoin nodes being up or down. I said the number of PCs capable of running full nodes is increasing and will not be decreasing any time soon. Maybe one day it will, but this decade is not it, and I seriously doubt the next decade is, either.[/quote]

Satoshi also envisioned ASICs dominating the network and being run in a more centralized manner, but many people forget that as well. Centralization is not necessarily a bad thing, depending on the circumstances and if that centralization can be counterbalanced with the ability to quickly and decisively eliminate the negative forces of centralization, then I think that outweighs the risks.

This is false as wellⁱ. Sure, many things benefit from centralizationⁱⁱ, but the money supply is not one of them. And then you go on to say something that doesn't make sense.. What is the "counterbalance" to "quickly and decisively eliminate the negative forces of centralization?" You say this but fail to explain it. I see the risk in centralizing the full nodes; I don't see any benefit to it, especially when the same effect can be achieved via off-chain solutions that do not compromise the security of the network as a whole.

It is not false. Centralization can be good, especially in say e.g. mining. If mining pools did not exist and it was purely a peer-to-peer operation and a hard or even a soft fork happened that required immediate tending to, it would be virtually impossible to get enough clients to change in a fast enough time frame to save bitcoin. You'd have a massive hard fork and lots of angry people and a complete loss of confidence in bitcoin. This applies to the current state of bitcoin - that may change in the future, who knows, but it's true as of now. That being the case, since there are pools if a hard fork happens due to a protocol problem, a bug, some as yet unknown attack, etc... it will be (comparatively) trivial to get the top 5 or 6 major pools to change to a new bitcoin core node and all start mining the same chain, instead of a huge mess of tens of thousands of clients needing to change simultaneously to start mining the proper chain.

I'm not saying centralization is great, or even good. But it is the lesser of two evils in some instances and if it's a choice between a somewhat centralized bitcoin and no bitcoin at all, I'd say centralization falls on the side of good.

As for the counterbalance, one example is lined above. Having a centralized structure housed in 4 or 5 or even 15 top pools means if there's an attack or threat, the blockchain can evolve rapidly. The counterbalance I'm talking about is that if some pools go rogue, they can be shut out of the network fairly easily. Now, you can make the counter argument that it's easier to subvert X number of pools and take them rogue vs subverting X number of decentralized clients and taking them rogue and you'd be correct. We've seen with the massive botnets that it's possible to harness the power of a vast number of machines, and with bitcoin in it's current state, it is not out of the realm of possibility for even private individuals with moderately substantial means to subvert enough end clients to subvert the bitcoin network if one were sufficiently motivated and the network were completely decentralized. Neither is a perfect solution, but what I do know is that limiting the transaction volume to a paltry 1 MB is going to not only hurt bitcoin, but completely kill it as far as global, massive uptake goes.

Off chain solutions are a brain dead solution to a problem that doesn't exist. The problem is how to fix bitcoin and make it scalable... not how to make new software to accomplish the same task but in a different way. There are probably many uses and reasons to explore off chain and side chain scenarios, but none of them are even remotely close to the solution for the problem being discussed here.

i : Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System

The proof-of-work also solves the problem of determining representation in majority decision
making. If the majority were based on one-IP-address-one-vote, it could be subverted by anyone
able to allocate many IPs. Proof-of-work is essentially one-CPU-one-vote.

So by extension, we can say that you believe anyone able to allocate many CPUs should be allowed to subvert the blockchain? I don't get what you're getting at here.

ii : In which we discuss Datskovskiy's discussion of MPEx

Just so is the case with Bitcoins and markets : it makes perfect sense for the currency itself to be decentralized. It makes absolutely no sense at all for the marketplace to be decentralized. In fact, a decentralized market is about as much a market as a deenginized car is a car. The market is precisely where economic agents come together, that's what it does, it centralizes trade. Further, it is sensible for the currency itself to be as trustless as possible, and thus mechanisms that implement trustlessness are a net gain in that field. A market can never exist at all without trust, and so mechanisms that purportedly implement "trustlessness" are nothing but clunk in this field.

I'm sorry, maybe I don't understand where you're coming from, but why are you quoting Mircea Popescu? I admit I have not read this entire thread, so maybe there's a reason... but I don't see what value there is to quoting an insane, misogynistic, racist drug addict here? The guy has shown time and again that he has no idea what he's talking about and everything he has ever done in his life is complete garbage (just going by what I've read of and from him, so I could be incorrect). His quotes are like quoting "1, 2, 3, potato!" for all the value it brings.

[zebedee]

Mr Barron apparently worships not one but two false Gods.  Read everything he says in that light, cogitate, and prosper.

[hdbuck]

Mr Barron apparently worships not one but two false Gods.  Read everything he says in that light, cogitate, and prosper.

why always these coercive worshiping accusations? does it also implies the 'pro-fork' people worship gavin? why cant we just have a constructive talk about it without accusing one another of being a cultist?
seriously this is just ridiculous. grow up people.