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BTC Endgame

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Re: BTC Endgame

#191

Post by bouncycastle »

Laforet wrote: post #115
swinglock wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> PoS is still vaporware Why is that? Aren't Cardano and Polkadot PoS as they claim or doesn't it work?

No PoS algorithm has yet managed to solve the Nothing-at-stake problem, nor are they any more resistant to the abovementioned kind of hostile takeover by the nation state player compared to PoW. I can't speak for every PoS coin out there but Cardano/Ouroborous explicitly assumes partial synchrony which is arguably never a good idea for a supposedly permissionless blockchain.

Nothing-at-stake problem is solved with slashing & inactivity leaks.

Re: BTC Endgame

#192

Post by jackTheMan »

swader999 wrote: post #100
gavrif wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With that kind of control, they could just put a gun to anyone's head and ask them to start mining bitcoin and do it the way they want them to. It wouldn't have to depend on how many bitcoin miners are in China at the moment.

I'd wager the way China would exert control on miners there would be to regulate their access to electricity.

Even easier to put a backdoor on the newer miner boards.

Re: BTC Endgame

#193

Post by wruza »

Laforet wrote: post #162
wruza wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

periodically increase the block size, splitting the transaction fee among more transactions. Although larger blocks make it more difficult to produce hashes Couldn’t they simply lower the baseline difficulty along with a block size? Edit: and wouldn’t difficulty drop automatically in this case?

Bitcoin is best understood as a timestamping service that signs up to 1MB of information every 10 minutes. Recording monetary transactions is only one of its applications. The 10 minute interval is an important part of the consensus mechanism as it has been proven secure both theoretically and practically. With shorter block interval and odds of orphan blocks and small chain reorgs would become more likely and this c…

By the way larger blocks don't take longer to hash - only the fixed size header is used for PoW.

Yeah, I forgot about merkle trees or something like that. So, do I get it right, there is no problem in increasing a block size? Just start to sign up to 50MB every 10 minutes in 2022 and that’s it?

However larger or more blocks do require more bandwidth and storage to process.

But isn’t amount of data depend on tx count? No matter how big chunks you split them into, it’s the same bytes per minute in the end. Why hard limit at all?

Re: BTC Endgame

#194

Post by wruza »

fanciestManimal wrote: post #174
wruza wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

periodically increase the block size, splitting the transaction fee among more transactions. Although larger blocks make it more difficult to produce hashes Couldn’t they simply lower the baseline difficulty along with a block size? Edit: and wouldn’t difficulty drop automatically in this case?

Yea, difficulty would drop. You'd end up producing a block more often than every 10 minutes. There's probably some lower bound on difficulty (and block frequency) that also maintains network consensus.

I meant drop xN by less baseline but increase xN by more difficult blocks, thus still 10min per block. But your sibling commenter now noted that the block size doesn’t affect difficulty. That’s confusing.

Re: BTC Endgame

#195

Post by bouncycastle »

nostrademons wrote: post #17

You don't need a DoS attack under the assumptions of this project. It's already assumed that you control ~80% of hash rate, so you execute a 51% attack that mass double-spends coins and destroy all confidence in the integrity of the currency. Poof, nobody uses it. Note that China already controls ~65% of Bitcoin hash rate, so if they wanted to execute this right now, they probably could. That they haven't is one reas…

Yeah, correct.

Even if you do control 51%, it would be a big long term capital and operational expense to do so, so you'd probably want to play nice rather than destroy what you've built.

Besides, even if you attack it, a new network will just spring up again, possibly with a different mining algorithm, making your old mining gear obsolete.

Also, in PoS, another last resort "nuclear option" defence strategy would be to slash the nodes that attack the network through a hard fork. It's a "nuclear option" because in theory it's unlikely to happen, only used a deterrent.

"Slash" here means to confiscate and burn their staking deposit on the new network. (The old one will continue to operate where the arrackers reside, thus a "fork")

Re: BTC Endgame

#196

Post by mathiasrw »

AffableSpatula wrote: post #5
paulgb wrote: post #2

The linked Medium posts have a bit more content https://joekelly100.medium.com/how-to-kill-bitcoin-part-1-is... Note that this is from last July, when the price of BTC was significantly lower and thus the price of the attack is likely higher now. That said, this becomes more feasible in the long-run when mining is purely funded by transaction fees. Something I don’t see talked about much is the fact that, although Bi…

Hey, author here - I think you're absolutely right that there is a risk that demand for blockspace doens't generate sufficient block reward to provide useful security guarantees. If that is the case, it could cause the price of BTC to fall which could create a negative feedback loop. This would, at best, create an end of the 21m cap and at worst trigger a collapse of the game entirely.

This is why the original design focus on fees in great volume to be the main incentive to be a miner and using the block reward as both A) a way of distributing the original minting of coins and B) a transition mechanism until volume is so large that the fees can sustain the miner incentive.

Re: BTC Endgame

#197

Post by asdffdsa »

Assuming that the Chinese government can exercise control of the top 5 Chinese companies that control > 50% of the hash rate, what's stopping the Chinese government from corrupting the blockchain? E.g. only transactions from whitelisted wallet ids (e.g. CCP-approved institutions) go through, extortion, etc.

Re: BTC Endgame

#198

Post by Robotbeat »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #173
WJW wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always wondered about that and perhaps someone here can explain. After bitcoin reaches its "full" volume, mining rewards will go away and the only way miner income can stay the same is if transaction fees rise to match. Since the competition of miners basically converges to "block reward is equal to electricity cost equivalent", this would mean transaction costs increase to an insanely huge amount. Not paying the l…

There is no strict technical limit on the number of transactions per block. Due to the rising price, each block is currently worth something like $350k. The Bitcoin network rules restrict it to a couple thousand transactions per block. Even with that, each on-chain transaction would "only" need to cost $100 or so to replace the block reward. Infeasible for micropayments, perfectly fine for large scale settlements. An…

A million transactions per block would increase the block size to a Gigabyte or so. That means the blockchain grows at 52TB a year, significantly increasing the cost of maintaining a full node.

But even that is really not fully taking into account how expensive transactions would be.

The current Bitcoin block size and block rate and transaction size limit the network to 7 transactions per second. There are over 7 billion people. Which means that if everyone used Bitcoin, they could get at most 1 transaction every billion seconds. A billion seconds is over 31 years. Bitcoin as it is now is not for the rubes. Layer 1 transactions will, long-term, only be for larger entities. There’d effectively be a hierarchy of who can actually afford to submit transactions on the blockchain, which very much goes against the ethos of the original Satoshi paper.

And even with your million transactions per block, you’re still talking about only one transaction per month or two per person in the world, which is far from microtransactions. The transaction fee would necessarily be a lot more than 35¢, as otherwise more people would use it directly.

So it’s just not feasible to be both scalable and accessible without a huge hierarchy (ie only big players get to do transactions) and high transaction costs. At least not with the current architecture.

Re: BTC Endgame

#199

Post by c-cube »

jacksnipe wrote: post #137
inopinatus wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The implication, that no other nation-state may use force to assert control of a strategic economic resource, is in contradiction with both history and common sense. GP is ipso facto calling out lazy casual racism, but framed constructively because they’re better at it than me.

Uh, no, other countries don’t have 65% of the hashing capacity. The USA could put a gun to miners heads, but it wouldn’t give them 51%, so there’s no point.

For all we know, the NSA has a ton of secret miners it could switch on suddenly to launch a 51% attack. Prove me wrong .

(ok this is the stuff of conspiracy theories but it's still a possibility, isn't it?)

Re: BTC Endgame

#200

Post by mathiasrw »

wmf wrote: post #157
jpsalm wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea that's what I don't understand either. Is the plan to secure a fully-mined chain just rampant value-inflation in a way that is completely detached from supply and demand? Today my 1e-1000 bitcoin is worth 10 carrots, tomorrow it is worth 20 everything else held equal? How does that even work in practice? Alternatively you need transactions to pay entirely for the security of the chain. This doesn't seem feasible…

The "official" plan is for low-value transactions to happen on the Lightning Network and high-value (e.g. >$1M) transactions paying high fees to happen on-chain.

Lets assume they solve all the math challenges with the routing: The on-boarding is still a challenge as it demands one initial on-chain transaction.

If 10% of the current facebook users want to get on lightning and we can make 6 transactions per second it will take 17 months before all are on board - and this is assuming no other types of transactions (so any payment made with BTC will delay this)

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