Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st • Hacker News Board

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#181

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 11:38 AM UTC

lawn wrote: post #167

knocte wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> anybody can be a miner That is false, nowadays. > Let's not forget that anybody can be a miner! Even if you repeat a lie a thousand times, it's not going to become true :) Bitcoin's mining algorithm is so simple that mining industry has specialized too much, and now the best technology for it is ASICs. You cannot mine (or rather, it's nowhere near profitable) if you don't have access to this kind of hardware. And o…

> And of course, claiming that anybody can have access to this hardware is very very debatable. The best indicator of how this is not accessible by everybody is how centralized this industry is nowadays (just look at the correlation between ASIC manufacturers and owners of mining pools). Even if you repeat a lie a thousand times, it's not going to become true :) https://coin.dance/blocks Where is the centralization?…

[deleted]

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#182

Post by imaginenore » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 11:39 AM UTC

sktrdie wrote: post #158

All this "unconsensus" is weird to me given that PoW was created to fix just that. I don't understand how can any other group of people decide what should happen other than the miners. After all, anybody can be a miner. Anything other than that just doesn't make it decentralized anymore. If you trust the developers, exchanges or even users to make decisions, then why not just make a BitcoinSQL where the servers are c…

> I don't understand how can any other group of people decide what should happen other than the miners.

How about Bitcoin owners instead? Your vote is proportional to how much you have.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#183

Post by numbsafari » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 11:39 AM UTC

sktrdie wrote: post #158

All this "unconsensus" is weird to me given that PoW was created to fix just that. I don't understand how can any other group of people decide what should happen other than the miners. After all, anybody can be a miner. Anything other than that just doesn't make it decentralized anymore. If you trust the developers, exchanges or even users to make decisions, then why not just make a BitcoinSQL where the servers are c…

> one-CPU-one-vote

"He who has the chips, makes the rules."

The problem with your understanding is two-fold: first, "one CPU, one vote" sounds very egalitarian, but in practice it just means people buy vote share and therefore control.

The second is the idea that democracy is a perfect consensus system. That's only true if nobody agrees to fork.

No social contract is written in stone (despite millennia of efforts to do so).

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#184

Post by ncallaway » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 11:51 AM UTC

simias wrote: post #163

iopq wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the incentive is that after you lock $50 in Bitcoins you get to spend $50 eventually for the same transaction fee so if the transaction fee is $0.50, you get to transact at 1% cost if you paid $0.50 for each coffee it would be 10%

Seems like a good deal for the coffee shop (you don't have to pay for the Visa fee and you get some free customer retention on top of it all) but as a customer what do I gain from that, practically speaking? The only thing I can think of is low fees if I'm traveling abroad. But if the fees are really very low then your incentive becomes void, I won't bother putting $50 in the coffee shop if it only saves me $0.001 in…

> Can you really imagine how this would work IRL?

Yes. This is basically the exact user experience of the Starbucks app, and it's a fine experience.

You pre-pay an amount, have a balance open, transactions reduce that balance, and you occasionally need to reload your balance with another credit card transaction.

Which is to say I don't think this is an intractable problem if there is good software with good user experiences to help out.

All that said, I'm not current on the block-size vs SegWit debate, so my analogy could be flawed.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#185

Post by davidgerard » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 11:52 AM UTC

ftlio wrote: post #96

jpatokal wrote: post #20

Well, that's a remarkably uninformative announcement. Here's an attempt at a neutral tl;dr from a Bitcoin amateur. Bitcoin is currently suffering from significant scaling problems, which lead to high transaction fees. Numerous proposals to fix the scaling issue have been proposed, the two main camps being "increase the block size" and "muddle through by discarding less useful data" (aka Segregated Witness/SegWit). Ho…

That "Bitcoin is currently suffering from significant scaling problems" is the topic of debate. SegWit was not created toward the end of increasing the blocksize, it was created to fix transaction malleability along with various other improvements. That it arranges the partitioning of witness data from transaction data to sort-of not count against the block size was a bonus, especially since a lot of dubious attempts…

> That "Bitcoin is currently suffering from significant scaling problems" is the topic of debate.

I find it hard to see how anyone could reasonably dispute it. Transactions were fast and cheap-to-free until mid-2015, when the blocks filled. Since then transactions have been slow and expensive.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#186

Post by davidgerard » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 11:56 AM UTC

Hermel wrote: post #71

zby wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is probably not possible to solve the scaling problems on-chain - a secure decentralized consensus on a global scale cannot be fast. Currently the bitcoin protocol processes about 7 transactions per second. Doubling the speed by doubling blocks will not make it much closer to the 50K transactions per second of a system like VISA. But it is probably possible to scale the transaction system off-chain - with https://…

I'm really tired of hearing the "increasing the block size won't suffice"-argument. Yes, increasing blocks to 10 MB won't give us VISA-scale, but it will allow Bitcoin to serve TEN TIMES AS MANY USERS! I can't believe how many otherwise intelligent people fail to see that this is desirable. It's like driving your car at 10 km/h per hour on the high-way and refusing to increase your speed because that would still not…

The most compelling argument I know of against bigger blocks is that the big blockers have started putting Craig Wright (Nakamoto Dundee) forward as, like, any sort of expert.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#187

Post by patrickk » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 12:03 PM UTC

ktta wrote: post #179

patrickk wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ethereum Classic's price is no where near Ethereum's but it is still maintaining a good position - 5th by Market Cap and 3rd by 24hr volume. ETC's price is being pumped up (some more context can be found on /r/ethereum), in some cases by taking advantage of newcomers looking to get into the ETH craze, helped by the fact that the Ethereum Foundation doesn't seem interested in maintaining ownership how the word "Ethe…

I didn't really find any proper reason as to how it is being pumped. Just about ETC misleading people into buying it. Any links? >There's no real technological innovation or developer interest in ETC. I mean, ETC guys can just push all of the new developments in ETH to their code. The codebase is the same. There probably won't be any original developments in ETC, but they don't really need much to stay on par with ET…

Barry Silbert/Coindesk are quite pro-ETC and anti-ETH, just to name two examples.

Here's an intro (google around for more): https://www.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/comments/6d62td/the_story...

https://medium.com/@charlescmackay/barry-silbert-and-the-cos...

Not saying ETH is perfect, far from it, but ETC is a pumped up scam for sure. They're using "Ethereum" in the name to fool newbies, likely propping up the price at current levels. I seriously doubt anyone know is knowledgable/not in on the scam really invests in a coin that is identical to ETH but none of the leadership, community or dev interest.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#188

Post by simias » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 12:03 PM UTC

ncallaway wrote: post #184

simias wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like a good deal for the coffee shop (you don't have to pay for the Visa fee and you get some free customer retention on top of it all) but as a customer what do I gain from that, practically speaking? The only thing I can think of is low fees if I'm traveling abroad. But if the fees are really very low then your incentive becomes void, I won't bother putting $50 in the coffee shop if it only saves me $0.001 in…

> Can you really imagine how this would work IRL? Yes. This is basically the exact user experience of the Starbucks app, and it's a fine experience. You pre-pay an amount, have a balance open, transactions reduce that balance, and you occasionally need to reload your balance with another credit card transaction. Which is to say I don't think this is an intractable problem if there is good software with good user expe…

But Starbucks is the perfect use case for this Lightning scenario, it's a frequent purchase for a relatively small amount. Basically anywhere where a "voucher" system like this starbucks app exists lightning could probably fit with minor disturbance.

Now take amazon, take that small shop on the street where you go twice a year because it's super expensive but it's also opened very late, take your car mechanic, take that guy on ebay you're buying a pair of socks from, take that restaurant in Berlin during your vacation where you'll probably never go back. Will you be willing to "pledge" 10 times the amount while buying there? And if not won't the fee be dissuasive? What's in it for me?

And won't that create negative side effects for competition? For instance if a new coffee shop opens next to Starbucks with your system I have an incentive to keep going to Starbucks since it already has an open channel (exactly what the Starbucks app is about, except I'm paying for it, not Starbucks), so effectively it makes it harder for newcomers to compete. Same thing for, say, amazon vs. some random ebay seller. The more popular a shop, the more likely it'll be to have an open channel pending. Isn't that going against the "completely decentralized currency" ethos? What good is it that the currency is decentralized if I can effectively only use it with a limited number of companies?

It would be pretty amusing to me to see the cyberpunk libertarian cryptocurrency turn into a glorified Costco membership.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#189

Post by knocte » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 12:05 PM UTC

lawn wrote: post #167

knocte wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> anybody can be a miner That is false, nowadays. > Let's not forget that anybody can be a miner! Even if you repeat a lie a thousand times, it's not going to become true :) Bitcoin's mining algorithm is so simple that mining industry has specialized too much, and now the best technology for it is ASICs. You cannot mine (or rather, it's nowhere near profitable) if you don't have access to this kind of hardware. And o…

> And of course, claiming that anybody can have access to this hardware is very very debatable. The best indicator of how this is not accessible by everybody is how centralized this industry is nowadays (just look at the correlation between ASIC manufacturers and owners of mining pools). Even if you repeat a lie a thousand times, it's not going to become true :) https://coin.dance/blocks Where is the centralization?…

> Where is the centralization?

If there was no centralization, people would still be profitable doing solo mining. Most of the pools these days are pools because they own huge mining datacenters already (not because they have a lot of miner-users).

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#190

Post by BenoitP » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 12:12 PM UTC

jsn wrote: post #168

BenoitP wrote: post #144

To me, hashing power is not the process by which the outcome will be decided. IMHO, the percentage of technical signalling will not even matter that much. Two chains will get created quite quickly. And some BTC holders will try to take advantage of the situation. Since transactions can get replayed on the other chain (and copying them from one chain to the other brings a stability advantage) the technical way things…

Why do you think that being the exchange used for cashing out is a bad position to be for an exchange? My understanding is, exchanges earn money on commissions, so the more volume they get, the better, and cashing out sure is some volume. Those speculators who buy BTC on the wrong chain -- sure, they will take a hit on that. But the exchange itself will still get their commission just fine. Am I missing something her…

You are actually right. It is not the exchange that would be affected, provided they haven't taken positions in their own markets.

Exchanges should make it pretty clear on which chain they will be operating, still.

I don't think trying to process transactions on both chains would be the right move.