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Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

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Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#311

Post by paulmd »

rothbardrand wrote: post #111
rnhmjoj wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the cost? It was 36MB originally and it has been reduced to 1MB as a temporary measure to limit spam.

The cost is that larger blocks have difficulty crossing the great firewall of china and mining is already centralized there. I have seen this myself with a production blockchain and blocks that were less than 1mb. Increasing the size increases this effect and gives Chinese miners and artificial advantage. Plus there's no congestion on the network right now. There's not a scaling problem. It was spam. Further, segwit…

> The cost is that larger blocks have difficulty crossing the great firewall of china and mining is already centralized there.

Ironically, this has actually become a real Byzantine Generals problem. Guess Bitcoin can't actually solve that problem in the real world.

From what I understand, China isn't too keen on the whole endeavor since it circumvents their (stringent) capital controls. What happens if they turn the baleful eye of their deep packet inspection onto the Bitcoin network? (serious question)

(Background for those who don't know: encryption/etc don't work against the Great Firewall, it knows what a given type of connection "looks like" in terms of packets/activity, so it can identify (eg) a VPN session even if it's "wrapped" or "tunneled" across some other protocol. They use a massive amount of machine learning hardware to profile connections in realtime to pick out "suspicious" activity and those connections will be dropped after a few moments. It's not impossible to run arbitrary connections through the firewall but it's very difficult and getting harder all the time.)

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#312

Post by sethev »

_red wrote: post #217
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://…

The 7 TPS claim is an apples-to-oranges comparison. You must remember that Bitcoin transactions are "settled" in that 7 TPS timescale, whereas VISA transactions are merely "recorded" in their 50K TPS rate. In reality, it generally takes a minimum of 15 days for your VISA transaction to "settle" with your bank account. Thereby the true TPS rate is orders of magnitude lower for VISA.

Even if you spread Visa's transactions evenly over time, the 100 billion transactions per year [1] that they perform would be a couple orders of magnitude higher than what bitcoin can support (~3000 TPS)

[1] https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visa-...

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#313

Post by lawn »

Taek wrote: post #205
joeblau wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the things that was confusing to me is the U in UASF. It's not a user actived soft fork, its certain miners vs other miners.

Understanding a UASF requires understanding where hashrate comes from. Bitcoin is very clever in that hashrate costs money, and not just a little money, it costs a lot of money. Which chain has more work is approximately saying 'which chain destroyed the most value in electricity'. The proof of work powering bitcoin costs hundreds of millions of dollars per year. Nobody burns hundreds of millions per year for free. T…

> So even if the UASF doesn't seem to have majority support, it's really bad for you as a miner and as a user if it ever eventually does gain majority support. So when the UASF has a lot of traction, really the safest move is to join the UASF, because at least then your coins aren't at risk of being eliminated entirely.

Yes, but that is only if UASF gets a significant portion of the miners to switch.

This is also why Bitmain has publicly announced the UAHF, to hard fork away from the original chain, to avoid this possible scenario.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#314

Post by lawn »

atemerev wrote: post #137

For me, the lightning network is the obviously right solution, bringing more decentralization and totally removing the need for global consensus. Why it is not that popular, I don't know.

Because LN has been vaporware since it's been announced, claiming to solve all the problems but have yet to done so. On chain scaling has also been shunned in favor of LN but it's still far from ready.

You talk about decentralization but it's not shown, and may not even be possible, how the LN should work without relying on centralized hubs.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#315

Post by placeybordeaux »

Taek wrote: post #197
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…

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.

More likely you just have 1BTC in an open connection to a company that specializes in strong connections to the LN, such as bitpay or coinbase.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#316

Post by buttershakes »

This will go down as a massive failure in governance. The Bitcoin core guys have completely created this situation by taking a hard liner stance based on a non issue. Committing to a 2 megabyte hard fork 2+ years ago would have averted this situation and kept control within the core dev team. Now we see miners taking a stance because SegWit doesn't necessarily benefit them. Further payment channels and other off chain scaling haven't really been tested or materialized, and the SegWit code itself is a series of changes to the fundamentals of Bitcoin without requiring a hard fork. In other words it is overly engineered to avoid having to have real consensus.

Further the almost rabid attacks against a 2mb increase are bordering on complete insanity. No serious software engineer would say that an additional 1 megabyte of traffic every 10 minutes is a problem in any way. Instead we are stuck with a proportional increase in bandwidth and processing to support segwit and a minor increase in block size, which is through some convoluted logic preventing centralization. This whole thing is a power grab, plain and simple.

Now the alternative implementations are racing to complete something the miners will agree with, the sole purpose being to wrest control away from the "Bitcoin core" development group which has made some a complete mess of governance. Anyone who invested in Blockstream has to seriously be scratching their heads and wondering why they are killing the golden goose over some ideological bs instead of making what is really a trivial change. I think at this point they have screamed so loudly for so long that back tracking would reveal them to be hypocritical in the extreme. To couch this whole debate as a rallying cry against centralized interests instead of a corporate power grab is completely absurdist.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#317

Post by runeks »

RandomKid wrote: post #95
runeks wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter how well you protect your gold, you can never protect its value, since this will be diluted if someone else brings a lot of gold to market. That's what happened during the ~1700s: lots of gold was brought to market because of world travel and disrupted local economies. Bitcoin prevents this by automatically adjusting difficulty. Asteroid mining can make gold useless, while Bitcoin would continue to…

>> you can never protect its (gold's) value, since this will be diluted if someone else brings a lot of gold to market... Bitcoin prevents this by automatically adjusting difficulty. It doesn't prevent it. If everyone decides to sell BTC now (including the big whales owning the major portion), it's price in USD will fall, too. How is this different?

What I meant was that newly mined gold can cause extremely large flows into the market (much more than all the whales dumping at once), which is what happened ~300 years ago. Gold had large geographic differences in the difficulty of mining it, which Bitcoin solves through adjusting difficulty.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#318

Post by jsn »

BenoitP wrote: post #190
jsn wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, it's not the first fork in the world, ethereum's fork was pretty big (ETH vs ETC). As far as I can see, exchanges just treat both sides of the fork as two completely separate currencies (which, in fact, they are).

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#319

Post by zhoujianfu »

buttershakes wrote: post #316

This will go down as a massive failure in governance. The Bitcoin core guys have completely created this situation by taking a hard liner stance based on a non issue. Committing to a 2 megabyte hard fork 2+ years ago would have averted this situation and kept control within the core dev team. Now we see miners taking a stance because SegWit doesn't necessarily benefit them. Further payment channels and other off chai…

Well put and 100% correct in my opinion. I feel like everybody's starving and there are hundreds of free hamburgers sitting right in front of them and core is blocking everybody from grabbing them while yelling "Don't eat those or you'll all die of heart attacks some day!!!"

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#320

Post by mmagin »

buttershakes wrote: post #316

This will go down as a massive failure in governance. The Bitcoin core guys have completely created this situation by taking a hard liner stance based on a non issue. Committing to a 2 megabyte hard fork 2+ years ago would have averted this situation and kept control within the core dev team. Now we see miners taking a stance because SegWit doesn't necessarily benefit them. Further payment channels and other off chai…

As an outsider, I find it especially amusing that cryptocurrencies are supposed to make it so that users don't have to live with the politics surrounding traditional currency.
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