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Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

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Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#191

Post by nfin »

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…

Hi!

I don't have much time right now, because I am at work, but maybe later I either post more or a better link.

To be very short: Bitcoin has not been thought to give miners all the power. In the contrary, their main function is timestamping the transactions! And not much more. Full nodes (or hopefully in the not too distant future advanced-spv-nodes) that should be run by many people (at least the conomic important ones, like exchanges, ...) do also verify the correctness and reject miners if they lie or don't behave in the economically-majority intended way! Miners are there so that we know what we (full nodes) should verify (and not blindly believe). Without miners we would not know which blocks to verify (there would be near infinite opinions/blocks). Miners make the choice what to verify just smaller, it doesn't make it automatically the truth.

Here a comment that shows that it was written from day 1 like this in the whitepaper:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6hefd8/comment/diy...

(not the best link, but ok for now. And of course economic majority is not a clear thing, but that doesn't mean that miner alone have the power. Beside miner there are the exchanges, the users, the api-providing companies, ... often grouped in 4 categories if you look at videos from Andreas Antonopoulos)

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#192

Post by antocv »

knocte wrote: post #173
zero_iq wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am rather stunned that the entire global bitcoin network, with its colossal combined computing power, and staggering electricity consumption, is only capable of sustaining 7 tps. The level of inefficiency here is mind-boggling. Surely this must be one of the least efficient, least environmentally-friendly computing ventures ever?

This is only layer1 (like IP in the networking world). Wait until layer2 comes (Lightning Network, TumbleBit), then we will reach the scalability levels we need for the entire planet to use the same blockchain.

The keyword is wait.

Waiting. Since 2011.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#193

Post by Doxin »

nthcolumn wrote: post #151

I obviously don't understand this at all. I thought it was distributed and that that was the whole point.

It is distributed, and that is the whole point. The difficulty lies in being unable to force anyone to do anything, so any change to the protocol runs the risk of bitcoin splitting two incompatible halves. Changes like these have happened in the past without too much trouble, but these days there's more money and politics involved, so it's wait-and-see as to the outcome. Worst case bitcoin will permanently split into Bitcoin A and Bitcoin B. In practice I think it's fairly unlikely.

Just suspend your trading near the date until this kerfuffle sorts itself out and you should be fine.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#194

Post by lawn »

knocte wrote: post #189
lawn wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

That's not how we should see decentralization, "lacking a central point of control" is a better definition. What you're arguing for is the mining to be distributed.

https://medium.com/@johnblocke/decentralization-fetishism-is...

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#195

Post by jcfrei »

zby wrote: post #53
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…

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://…

There are some new attempts being made without using a blockchain but still reaching the same level of consensus or finality. They are usually based on DAOs (directed acyclic graphs - not to be confused with The DAO Organization). A good introduction is this paper: Blockchain-Free Cryptocurrencies: A Framework for Truly Decentralised Fast Transactions - https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/871.pdf It was previously discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14730354

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#196

Post by qmarchi »

knocte wrote: post #173
zero_iq wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am rather stunned that the entire global bitcoin network, with its colossal combined computing power, and staggering electricity consumption, is only capable of sustaining 7 tps. The level of inefficiency here is mind-boggling. Surely this must be one of the least efficient, least environmentally-friendly computing ventures ever?

This is only layer1 (like IP in the networking world). Wait until layer2 comes (Lightning Network, TumbleBit), then we will reach the scalability levels we need for the entire planet to use the same blockchain.

But, but, but...... IP is on Layer 3 ;.;

OSI Model: http://www.webopedia.com/quick_ref/OSI_Layers.asp

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#197

Post by Taek »

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…

You missed a really important feature of lightning. If you have a channel open with Starbucks, and Starbucks has a channel open to Wal-Mart, and Wal-Mart has a channel to $local_bank, which has a channel to $local_store, then you can use your Starbucks channel to pay $local_store.

It's much better than a Starbucks app.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#198

Post by xorcist »

julian_1 wrote: post #75
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://…

A counter-argument is that the Lightening work is a proprietary development outside of bitcoin core (lead by Blockstream) and the work is even patent-encumbered. They state the ip is for defensive purposes only - however that is questionable given that anything they implement, automatically becomes prior-art. It is also contrary to the spirit and practice of the majority of crypto/alt projects. It is unreasonable to…

> proprietary development

No, it is not only open source but a healthy mailing list with a lot of interested parties.

> lead by Blockstream

No, Poon and Dryja are not employed by the company Blockstream. The latter seems to be more focused on their sidechain solutions.

> the work is even patent-encumbered

No, there is nothing to suggest this. Patents have to be public at some point.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#199

Post by Taek »

anopows wrote: post #150
Taek wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though it has industry support, it does not have user support, because it does not have a working, tested implementation released. With less than 3 weeks until the fork triggers, I highly doubt they are going to get substantial user adoption by the time the fork triggers. One of the most amazing properties of Bitcoin is that it's completely user driven. When it comes to the fundamental consensus rules, no amount of h…

How do you define user support? All the definitions I heard are able to be manipulated easily: -The/r/bitcoin consensus? Is mainly in existence because of censorship -User wallets online? Can be easily created with AWS instances -Bitcoin core? Who decides these bunch of people are in charge to represent all users and not a bunch of other developers? One obvious alternative is to let Bitcoin follow economic incentives…

User support is really easily measured in the event of a split and really hard to measure before the split.

Quite simply, the coin price indicates support. After the split, there will be two versions of the Bitcoin network with independent prices. A non zero price indicates non-zero support, and as long as it's at least 25% of the original price, it'll probably be okay.

A high price indicates high support.

In the long term, the hashrate follows the price. Miners will mine the coin with the highest price, because they can't afford any other option. Electricity is expensive.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#200

Post by xorcist »

joosters wrote: post #166
julian_1 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A counter-argument is that the Lightening work is a proprietary development outside of bitcoin core (lead by Blockstream) and the work is even patent-encumbered. They state the ip is for defensive purposes only - however that is questionable given that anything they implement, automatically becomes prior-art. It is also contrary to the spirit and practice of the majority of crypto/alt projects. It is unreasonable to…

The 'lightning network' has been one of the promised solutions 'coming soon' for many years now. Except, no-one has solved all its problems yet. There remain difficult issues to do with routing of transactions, and some horrible money-losing behaviour if users don't stay online to protect their channels from being looted. On top of that, there's not enough space on the blockchain to allow everyone to open & close a p…

If Bitcoin took (likely more than) ten years to get to the state where we are now, it's likely that second layer solutions such as Lightning are not developed overnight.
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