Great.. Some /r/btc extremists found a YC thread to troll. Is nothing sacred anymore?
Extremists are trolling, what a productive way of dismissing opinions
I'm sure everyone is here just to illicit a reaction from others
Update for Customers with Bitcoin Stored on GDAX
61–70 of 75 posts
Re: Update for Customers with Bitcoin Stored on GDAX
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a lot of back story behind this. The story as I see it is this - a bank which opposes bitcoin in its current form funded a company called Blockstream to kick the lead developer off the Bitcoin development team and take control of it. They want to change the protocol away from a decentralized blockchain which they can't control to a payment channel system which provides a potential financial services marketpla…
I'm a Bitcoin Core Dev. I'm not employed by Blockstream. I work extensively on scalability, having personality designed and written patches to Bitcoin which have drastically improved block validation times in the Bitcoin Core client. For the benefit of anyone taking your comment at face value, I'm here to say: Your response is total garbage. edit: More details, my response was written slightly in haste... 1. I'm a (n…
In regards to Bitcoin always needing fees:
That's true, but there's a fundamental difference between the fee structure when blocks are full vs not full.
When not full, and I believe the way the system was intended to work, the tendency is for miners to compete for users fees; hence the fees will tend to the actual cost of mining. Just enough for miners to stay in business and secure the network, with all extra value being captured by the users.
When full, users compete for mining space, and as such fees tend to the value of a bitcoin transaction. Which means all extra value is captured by the miners, and the users eventually have no incentive to use bitcoin as their transactions tend to be as expensive as they're worth.
Another troubling side effect of that is because of the zero-sum nature of mining, the extra fees will eventually just cause difficulty to increase to match, slowly pushing bitcoin's cost to match its value, providing very little (really almost no) incremental decentralization/security to the network.
The artificial barrier to the number of transactions essentially causes the world to waste electricity while at the same time slowly killing bitcoin. If the barrier were always kept just slightly above the demand for transactions however, bitcoin would operate completely healthily and the (nice low) fees would always provide just enough incentive for miners to continue to mine... by definition!
Re: Update for Customers with Bitcoin Stored on GDAX
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can read Gavin's writing directly. After all his contributions, the lies and manipulations by the current blockstream employees are pretty disgusting. If you read /r/btc on reddit you can see a forum that in uncensored, unlike the HEAVILY censored and 'curated' (threads that don't go the way the mods want are sorted by controversial first) /r/bitcoin. Anyone on /r/bitcoin that says something alluding to censorshi…
/r/btc is a forum paid for by people who want to fork bitcoin, and their moderators are paid employees of Roger Ver. You can't believe a word they say.
This is of course silly, since /r/btc does not censor anyone and has open moderation logs, while /r/bitcoin is censored to a degree that would make north korea blush.
Re: Update for Customers with Bitcoin Stored on GDAX
#64I don't think I'm literate enough on the technology and economics to know which is better, but the amount of vitriol in the Core/Unlimited debate has convinced me to sell most of my BTC. I'm incredibly appreciative to the community for all the work it has contributed to the blockchain/crypto space. That said, I see the current anger and resentment a major risk factor to the future of the currency, far more significant than the outcome of this decision either way. I sincerely hope cooler heads prevail soon. Until then however, I'll be keeping my capital away.
Re: Update for Customers with Bitcoin Stored on GDAX
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a lot of back story behind this. The story as I see it is this - a bank which opposes bitcoin in its current form funded a company called Blockstream to kick the lead developer off the Bitcoin development team and take control of it. They want to change the protocol away from a decentralized blockchain which they can't control to a payment channel system which provides a potential financial services marketpla…
x-post of one of my reddit post. (disclaimer: I am employed by Blockstream) It's helpful to evaluate the contribution of Blockstream developers to Bitcoin Core versus other non-Blockstream developers in the last year. Let's see Greg Maxwell: 46 Jorge Timon: 17 Pieter Wuille: 163 (the only developer at Blockstream dedicated full time to Core development) Mark Friedenbach: 0 Patrick Strateman: 31 Warren Togami: 6 Adam…
Quantifying commits does not correlate to who is controlling the architecture of a codebase. Someone can control the architecture with a single commit, provided that commit is large enough.
Re: Update for Customers with Bitcoin Stored on GDAX
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
/r/btc is a forum paid for by people who want to fork bitcoin, and their moderators are paid employees of Roger Ver. You can't believe a word they say.
This is of course silly, since /r/btc does not censor anyone and has open moderation logs, while /r/bitcoin is censored to a degree that would make north korea blush.
Yes they do. They ban anyone who mentions that roger ver pays the moderators.
Re: Update for Customers with Bitcoin Stored on GDAX
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a form of wishful thinking. Miners, and only miners, determine what goes onto a blockchain. Non-mining nodes are just database replication slaves and message forwarders. Unless you're a miner, your node doesn't matter. Who will buy and sell an altcoin does matter. That's where liquidity and prices come from. But that's independent of who is running a node.
Miners have absolutely zero say on what goes into the blockchain. That's what nodes do. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_%28computer_science%... > A fundamental problem in distributed computing and multi-agent systems is to achieve overall system reliability in the presence of a number of faulty processes. This often requires processes to agree on some data value that is needed during computation. Examples o…
"They vote with their CPU power, expressing their acceptance of valid blocks by working on extending them and rejecting invalid blocks by refusing to work on them" refers to miners. Only by mining can a the blockchain be extended. Only a miner can confirm a transaction. Other nodes can check transactions for validity, but real confirmation, and double-spend protection, can only come from miners.
The original vision of Bitcoin, as described in that paper, was of a peer to peer network where most nodes mined with spare CPU cycles. That stopped working once dedicated mining hardware was developed and deployed in quantity. Anybody can still try to mine, but without dedicated hardware in large quantities, it's an exercise in futility. Only 0.5% of mining power today is not part of a known large pool.[1] The top 5 mining pools have a majority of the mining power.
Non-mining nodes just maintain a copy of the blockchain, and occasionally forward transactions to miners. The bigger players usually connect directly to mining pools, rather than bothering with going through some random node, so they get faster confirmations.
That's how Bitcoin works today.
Re: Update for Customers with Bitcoin Stored on GDAX
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
x-post of one of my reddit post. (disclaimer: I am employed by Blockstream) It's helpful to evaluate the contribution of Blockstream developers to Bitcoin Core versus other non-Blockstream developers in the last year. Let's see Greg Maxwell: 46 Jorge Timon: 17 Pieter Wuille: 163 (the only developer at Blockstream dedicated full time to Core development) Mark Friedenbach: 0 Patrick Strateman: 31 Warren Togami: 6 Adam…
Quantifying commits does not correlate to who is controlling the architecture of a codebase. Someone can control the architecture with a single commit, provided that commit is large enough.
Burden of proof is on you. There isn't any magic pixie does here-- if it were the case someone would show it, but they can't.
Re: Update for Customers with Bitcoin Stored on GDAX
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
> funded a company called Blockstream to infiltrate the Bitcoin development team kick the lead developers off it. Blockstreeam was founded by long-time bitcoin lead developers. The rest of your post is paranoid nonsense.
Gavin Andresen was left as lead developer by Satoshi Nakomoto. He was forced out.
> left as lead developer by Satoshi Nakomoto
No he wasn't, he granted himself that title. Then largely left on his own in ~2013 to focus on the (now discredited and defunct) "Bitcoin Foundation" that he created.
The people developing the Bitcoin project have been pretty stable since 2011.
There is this lovely time coded git-blame chart that was put up last year: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1337008.0
People like Mike Hearn were always outsiders to the project, and have spent a lot of time doing this like arguing for blacklisting, blocking tor, and other things that most contributors think of as strongly at odds with the principles of the project.
Re: Update for Customers with Bitcoin Stored on GDAX
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Miners have absolutely zero say on what goes into the blockchain. That's what nodes do. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_%28computer_science%... > A fundamental problem in distributed computing and multi-agent systems is to achieve overall system reliability in the presence of a number of faulty processes. This often requires processes to agree on some data value that is needed during computation. Examples o…
"They vote with their CPU power, expressing their acceptance of valid blocks by working on extending them and rejecting invalid blocks by refusing to work on them" refers to miners. Only by mining can a the blockchain be extended. Only a miner can confirm a transaction. Other nodes can check transactions for validity, but real confirmation, and double-spend protection, can only come from miners. The original vision o…
When the author of a white-paper says 'nodes' he doesn't say one word, and mean another. You took this quote from Satoshi : "They vote with their CPU power, expressing their acceptance of valid blocks by working on extending them and rejecting invalid blocks by refusing to work on them"
And neglected to use the full quote : "Nodes can leave and rejoin the network at will, accepting the proof-of-work chain as proof of what happened while they were gone. They vote with their CPU power, expressing their acceptance of valid blocks by working on extending them and rejecting invalid blocks by refusing to work on them."
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Full_node
> Full nodes download every block and transaction and check them against Bitcoin's core consensus rules. Here are examples of consensus rules, though there are many more:
- Blocks may only create a certain number of bitcoins. (Currently 12.5 BTC per block.)
- Transactions must have correct signatures for the bitcoins being spent.
- Transactions/blocks must be in the correct data format.
- Within a single block chain, a transaction output cannot be double-spent.
> If a transaction or block violates the consensus rules, then it is absolutely rejected, even if every other node on the network thinks that it is valid. This is one of the most important characteristics of full nodes: they do what's right no matter what. For full nodes, miners actually have fairly limited power: they can only reorder or remove transactions, and only by expending a lot of computing power. A powerful miner is able to execute some serious attacks, but because full nodes rely on miners only for a few things, miners could not completely change or destroy Bitcoin.
https://www.cryptocompare.com/coins/guides/how-does-a-bitcoi...
> Each node builds its own transaction pool, which are mostly the same.
> The conditions can change and evolve over time and a present list can be checked through the AcceptToMemoryPool, CheckTransaction & CheckInputs functions in the bitcoin client.
1. The transactions syntax and data structure are correct. 2. The input and outputs have values. 3. The transaction is less than the block size of 1 MB. 4. The values must be more than 0 and less than 21 million. 5. None of the inputs have a hash that is equal to 0. 6. The locktime is less than the maximum allowed number. 7. The transaction size is greater than or equal to 100 bytes. 8. The number of signatures is less than the signatute limit. 9. The unlocking script can only push numbers onto the stack. 10. The locking script must match isstandard format. 11. A matching transaction must exist. 12. If a transaction is missing move the transaction to the orphan transaction pool. 13. If the transaction is a coinbase transaction then it must have a maturity of 100 confirmations. 14. For each input the output must exist and not have been spent. 15. Check that each input value is in the required range. 16. Reject if the input value is less than the output value. 17. Reject if the transaction value is to low to get into an empty block. 18. The unlocking scripts for each input must be verified against the output locking scripts.
So nodes accept the transactions, validate the transactions, replicate the transactions, maintain the mempools, validate the blocks, replicate the blocks, serve the blockchain, and store the blockchain. Nodes even define the PoW algorithm that miners have to employ.
So nodes maintain the protocol, not miners. It is thus. It has always been thus.
See for yourself. Download it. https://bitcoin.org/en/download . It's currently at 0.14.0
https://bitcoin.org/en/full-node
> A full node is a program that fully validates transactions and blocks. Almost all full nodes also help the network by accepting transactions and blocks from other full nodes, validating those transactions and blocks, and then relaying them to further full nodes.
You really need to learn how bitcoin works if you want to comment on it.