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It's Time For a Hard Bitcoin Fork

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Re: It's Time For a Hard Bitcoin Fork

#101

Post by alwaysdoit »

Aqueous wrote: post #98
josu wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's in Bitcoin community's, and GHash's, economic interest that no miner exceeds 50%. Are Bitcoin community's interests and individual miners' interests aligned? I understand why the bitcoin community wouldn't want a mining pool with more than 50% of the share, but why should "selfish" individual miners care?

If the blockchain is dominated by a single interest, and that player starts abusing their market position, BitCoin's exchange rate will plummet and the economic interest in question will lose millions. So yes, it is in the community's interest and individual miners' interest to keep the hashrate distributed enough to prevent that from happening. What happens when people lose faith in the system? The 2008 financial cr…

What stops them from taking a short position in Bitcoins and forcing the exchange rate into the ground?

Re: It's Time For a Hard Bitcoin Fork

#102

Post by patcon »

cs702 wrote: post #85

Why would GHash ever want to attack the platform from which it profits and from which it will likely continue to profit, as a leading transaction processor, for many years to come? Should they be silly enough to attempt something nefarious, miners would quickly abandon them, and their business would collapse overnight. Every major participant in the Bitcoin network, including GHash, has a vested interest in maintaini…

So what if the anonymous maintainer works for the US government or a large banking institution? Running a slick-looking pool seems like the easiest way to get in control of enough hash power to set the bitcoin brand back years. Doing the "wrong" thing at the right time would mean further billions in profit without the effort of re-imagining the whole fincancial sector, assuming it staved off a cryptocurrency revolution.

Re: It's Time For a Hard Bitcoin Fork

#103

Post by ajb »

npizzolato wrote: post #73
chimeracoder wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like IPv4, the "experiment" has grown so large that it may be impossible to get consensus on any non-backwards-compatible change. How is that an accurate description of IPv4 at all? IPv6 has made monumental progress[0] in a relatively short time (yes, for what we're talking about, it's only been a short amount of time). [0] https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

Is 3% in three years really "monumental" progress? I honestly don't know much about the issue, but those numbers hardly seem monumental to me.

It's been on an exponential growth curve for a number of years, and the doubling time recently decreased to about 8 months. Whether that continues is of course anyone's guess, but if it does, after another three years it would be at 20-40% (depending on whether you take the recent trend (http://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1V1MLaAEiuNI99s7NO2ZgQ...) or the longer term trend (http://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1V1MLaAEiuNI99s7NO2ZgQ...)

Re: It's Time For a Hard Bitcoin Fork

#104

Post by mbell »

Lerc wrote: post #48
dmclain wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bitcoin protocol defines the longest chain as the correct/canonical chain. At 51% you have more hashing power than the rest of the network combined, so you can start mining blocks on your own and create your own chain with the knowledge that eventually your chain will be longer than the 49% chain everyone else is working on. When that happens, the 49% will abandon their chain and start working on yours.

What kind of chain length differential is enough to cause people to switch. Is it a single block?

> Is it a single block?

No. The 'winning chain' is determined by total difficulty, not block count.

Re: It's Time For a Hard Bitcoin Fork

#105

Post by bobbygoodlatte »

A hard fork would be just as devastating as a 51% attack. The author is way over-reacting here. In fact, it looks like GHash is down to 45% and dropping — BitFury just left, and Petamine is considering leaving too: http://www.coindesk.com/bitfury-pulls-power-ghash-community-...

Re: It's Time For a Hard Bitcoin Fork

#106

Post by baddox »

saalweachter wrote: post #38
aosmith wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're assuming that someone with a significant investment in the space would act dishonestly. That's the only reason BTC fails as the result of something like this. Seem like MAD to me, if they were to act dishonestly they would destroy their own investment and profit potential.

The point of a distributed system is not having to trust people to act honestly. If you're perfectly fine trusting a GHASH to act honestly, you should be perfectly fine trusting them or some other entity to run a centralized, non-distributed currency.

Your statement doesn't work out, because even if a single official mining pool doesn't have >50% of the hash rate, a bunch of small mining pools could be secretly colluding, or even just a bunch of individual people.

Re: It's Time For a Hard Bitcoin Fork

#107

Post by baddox »

dragontamer wrote: post #50
aosmith wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're assuming that someone with a significant investment in the space would act dishonestly. That's the only reason BTC fails as the result of something like this. Seem like MAD to me, if they were to act dishonestly they would destroy their own investment and profit potential.

Then why are you using BTC in the first place? The US Fed and US Government has no reason to act dishonestly. The value of the dollar relies on us trusting the US Government / US Fed to protect it. If switching over to BTC means "trusting GHash.io"... then nothing has changed.

I think you might want to look into the history of disastrous collapses of currencies. To think the US dollar is somehow impervious to the same threats is naive.

Re: It's Time For a Hard Bitcoin Fork

#108

Post by nardi »

SilasX wrote: post #97
socrates1024 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The basic idea for a delegation-breaking puzzle is outlined here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=309073.0 The intuition (which is described in the original article, by the way) is that in this puzzle, whoever actually finds the solution can take the entire reward for themselves. We've expanded this idea into a rigorous research paper that's currently undergoing peer review, but we may release a preprint soon…

After reading the post, I would rather phrase the key insight as: in the proposed protocol you don't have to reveal the nonce that hashes to the low value; rather, you prove you have it, thus destroying the connection between the nonce and the pool, so a solution can go out without any pool member being able to say "hey -- that was ours!" This destroys the ability of pool members to trust that their nonces, where val…

> Edit: with that said, I don't agree that eliminating mining pools is a good thing; that just rewards those who can enforce cooperation by some other means (say, having the capital to personally run the farm), which has a far more unequal distribution than mining pools.

In order for Bitcoin to work, in the sense that you don't have to trust anyone for it to be fair, then no group can ever have 51% of the hashing power of the network. It has now been proven that a mining pool can reach that threshold. It has NOT been proven that it is practically possible to buy that much hashing power. We should get rid of mining pools because they are the current cause of this crisis. We can cross the other bridge when we come to it (which it seems unlikely we ever will).

Re: It's Time For a Hard Bitcoin Fork

#109

Post by dragontamer »

baddox wrote: post #107
dragontamer wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why are you using BTC in the first place? The US Fed and US Government has no reason to act dishonestly. The value of the dollar relies on us trusting the US Government / US Fed to protect it. If switching over to BTC means "trusting GHash.io"... then nothing has changed.

I think you might want to look into the history of disastrous collapses of currencies. To think the US dollar is somehow impervious to the same threats is naive.

I'm criticizing BTC, not defending the dollar. Even precious commodities like Gold (Black Friday, 1869) and Silver (Panic of 1873) have been manipulated and crashed throughout the years.

All currencies suffer through booms and busts, even precious Gold and Silver.

However, BTC is unique in that wielding 51% hashing power grants you powers beyond what has ever been seen before in a currency. A properly wielded 51% can absolutely destroy an entire coin system (RIP Feathercoin).

Do NOT take the 51% attack lightly. This could mean the absolute ruin of BTC in its entirety.

Re: It's Time For a Hard Bitcoin Fork

#110

Post by jnbiche »

scythe wrote: post #94
nullc wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty easy to break delegation, but the cure is worse than the illness— to reduce mining variance there you must use hosted mining, where miners have even less control (absent more fixes…). GHash.IO is substantially hosted mining in any case. Really the more important point to note is that pooling for variance reduction has absolutely nothing to do with delegating control. Running a outbound only bitcoin full n…

>to reduce mining variance there you must use hosted mining Why should people [miners] be able to reduce variance at all? That's not a necessary feature of the system, and it doesn't seem like a goal worth pursuing. Security is paramount; mining variance is "first-world-problems". >say if GHash.io decides to steal a bunch of coins from their miners It seems far more likely that GHash would try to be sneaky about thef…

>Security is paramount; mining variance is "first-world-problems".

100% agree. If people who can't tolerate variance don't mind, then those who can tolerate it will.

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