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Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

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Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#351

Post by Retric »

Obi_Juan_Kenobi wrote: post #343
Retric wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Effectively 4 people, when they agree, completely control bitcoin. That's more centralized than the US dollar.

That's like saying Thomas W. Farley controls 21 trillion dollars worth of companies. Pools do not control hash power, they merely organize it. That's not to say they don't play a major role in the politics of Bitcoin clients and rules, but to say they 'completely control' Bitcoin is wholly incorrect. These sorts of hyperbolic statements greatly degrade the quality of discourse on centralization.

Thomas W. Farley is so far from the same thing, I can only assume your being intentionally disingenuous. It's much closer to talking about the CEO of hedge fund, and they frankly do have massive amounts of control.

However, in this case the Chinese government can take over these data centers on a whim. You can argue it's a different story when it's spread across a million basements, but highly centralized hashing power is easy to either take over or take offline.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#352

Post by 6nf »

Cakez0r wrote: post #131
stale2002 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kinda, they could DoS the UASF chain, but then the UASF chain could respond by doing a proof of work hard fork. If the community is behind it, then a POW change would render the 10s/hundreds of millions of dollars in mining equipment worthless. So the real question is whether or not the UASF side has the support of the community or economic majority.

You mean proof of stake? Is there a working implementation of proof of stake yet? I thought it was mostly theoretical and academic at the moment.

There are a few altcoins using Proof of Stake already

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#353

Post by kristianp »

Here's part of the warning message on bitcointalk [1]:

1. Ensure that you have no BTC deposited with a Bitcoin bank or other trusted third-party before Aug 1. If there's no technical way for you to export the private keys for your BTC, then that BTC is at risk. Some Bitcoin banks may assure you that they'll definitely keep your BTC safe, but I absolutely wouldn't trust them.

2. Do not send transactions or trust received transactions starting 12 hours before Aug 1 at midnight UTC, and continue this until you hear the "all clear" from several trustworthy sources. For example, I will post a forum news item if everything is OK, or if everything is not OK and action is required.

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2017191.0

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#354

Post by knocte »

flashdance wrote: post #307
knocte wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Expanded a bit my answer. IMVHO, ASIC hardware provides such a huge efficiency boost that even if everybody in this planet ran a mining raspberry pi, the ASIC manufacturers would maybe still own more than 51% of the hashrate.

Not maybe, definitely. A first-gen pi can mine at 200KH/s [1], and a 3rd gen pi is roughly 10x faster in cpu tests [2]. At 2 MH/s per pi, times 7 billion people, you get a paltry 14 petahashes/s. That's a hair over 0.2% of the network... You'd need three trillion raspberry pis to get half the network. Good luck with that! [1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Non-specialized_hardware_comparis... [2] http://lifehacker.com/ho…

Thanks so much for that analysis! My mind was not that irrational then when making that guess :)

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#355

Post by dmitriid »

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.

Meanwhile in real world I already have a channel that's open to everyone.

It's called a credit/debit card.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#356

Post by dmitriid »

coryfklein wrote: post #298
hueving wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capacity is scaling from the user perspective. If it costs $5 to send $5 worth of bitcoin because of transaction congestion and it's only processing a tiny fraction of what a single US credit card network does, the entire system is not scaling, regardless of how many nodes are running it.

> it costs $5 to send $5 worth of bitcoin Not that this is a whole lot better, but the cost is $1.48 for fastest confirmation time, and $0.42 if a delay of 15-300 minutes is acceptable to you. Source: https://bitcoinfees.21.co/

How is this supposed to be competitive with the real world?

Paypal transactions, Swish (Sweden), etc. etc. are instant and often with zero fees.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#357

Post by kungito »

_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.

Well it takes a longer time to settle but the settledPerSecond is still 50k.

Bandwidth != Latency

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#358

Post by davidgerard »

ftlio wrote: post #276
davidgerard wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

And yet the people who maintained the protocol and scaled transaction throughput while it grew to tens of billions of dollars in value largely dispute it. If SegWit could activate without a hostile takeover, it would be much easier to demonstrate why there are no scaling issues. A lot of ignorant people want to throw the baby out with the bath water though, so ultimately we're probably going to have two chains, one t…

It's like they went to Solomon and said "so, shall we cut the kid in half vertically or horizontally?" waving big knives around. Their plan is to use the halves of the corpse to beat each other to death.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#359

Post by h1d »

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…

Can you not simply do a small math?

Currently at 160GB or something with 1MB block, what storage do you think a node will require with 10MB block in the next 5 years when the usage will be growing?

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#360

Post by h1d »

lisper wrote: post #248
gtrubetskoy wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Increasing the block will solve the problem until the new size is not enough, which will be very soon. A larger block means a larger blockchain, and the nice thing about the blockchain is that you can download the entire thing. With a larger block it will outpace the storage advances and will not be downloadable for the average user, which means that only specifically equipped entities such as miners will be able to…

> With a larger block it will outpace the storage advances and will not be downloadable for the average user This has nothing to do with the block size. The size of the chain is proportional to the number of transactions. Whether those are sliced-and-diced into small blocks or large ones is completely irrelevant to how big the chain is. The only thing the block size influences is how many transactions can be mined in…

No. If a block is 10MB, you might as well keep spamming the blocks to centralize the node operation when the storage starts to require TBs.

Why do you think Satoshi's gave it an artificial 1MB limit if it didn't matter?

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