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Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

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Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#341

Post by Obi_Juan_Kenobi »

kerkeslager wrote: post #322
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…

My understanding is that SegWit allows companies to insert themselves as middle men in the system who provide fast transactions.

I think many recognize the value of federated 2nd layer solutions. Most are willing to accommodate some reasonable changes to the protocol to permit this. I think many would prefer a hard-fork 'cleaner' SegWit, but the softfork may have to do.

The real issue, I think, is that the main chain must remain a practical option for those that value it. Discovering the 'fair' cost for this while maintaining a secure network is very much an open question, and ultimately the source of all the controversy.

Personally I'd like to see unlimited block sizes, where txn fees and block orphan risk reach an equilibrium, but it's very difficult to say whether this would create unworkable centralization pressure.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#342

Post by Obi_Juan_Kenobi »

qznc wrote: post #247
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?…

If Antpool, BTC.top, F2Pool, and Bixin conspire, they control 51% of the mining power. There is the oligarchy aka centralization.

Pools are not miners. Pools can only make decisions that the miners will tolerate, and historically miners have recognized the dangers even of pool centralization.

There is very little friction to changing pools.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#343

Post by Obi_Juan_Kenobi »

Retric wrote: post #282
lawn wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#344

Post by Obi_Juan_Kenobi »

Taek wrote: post #210
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…

> I don't understand how can any other group of people decide what should happen other than the miners. You are missing one of the key economic components of Bitcoin. Mining costs a lot of money. Nobody mines for free or at a loss, because 'at a loss' means to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Miners unquestionably mine the chain that has the highest block reward. Historically, hashrate has always been a f…

I don't think any of that is a contradiction to the main claim that 'miners control the network'.

The very fact that miners are beholden to the economics is the key innovation in Bitcoin. It's the magic of the whitepaper.

> The incentive may help encourage nodes to stay honest. If a greedy attacker is able to assemble more CPU power than all the honest nodes, he would have to choose between using it to defraud people by stealing back his payments, or using it to generate new coins. He ought to find it more profitable to play by the rules, such rules that favour him with more new coins than everyone else combined, than to undermine the system and the validity of his own wealth.

It is precisely because miners have a vested interest in the economics of Bitcoin that they control the network. That's the magic behind 'Nakamoto consensus'.

> They vote with their CPU power, expressing their acceptance of valid blocks by working on extending them and rejecting invalid blocks by refusing to work on them. Any needed rules and incentives can be enforced with this consensus mechanism.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#346

Post by reefoctopus »

ambicapter wrote: post #306
unabridged wrote: post #50

This is late FUD, a last minute whine by the owners of "bitcoin.org" aka core. The discussion over scaling has been happening for many months and consensus has actually just been reached in the last couple weeks. 85% of the mining power is signalling for segwit2x, and if this continues it will lock in before Aug 1st completely avoiding the scary situation talked about in the post.

Does this mean that you could end up holding on to bitcoins that don't have anymore value? Or are you fine if you just wait for the longest chain to emerge and don't do any transactions until then?

You're fine if you wait for the longest chain to emerge.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#347

Post by rasz »

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…

I was always under (false?) impression Blocksize Increase opposition was due to hardcoded ASIC miners deployed by the majority of big players.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#348

Post by oh_sigh »

RandVal30142 wrote: post #171
rothbardrand wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you missed the key issue. Mining is largely centralized under the control of Bitmain, both via pools and indirectly via miners they have sold (which in the past have had backdoors). They profit from using an exploit called ASICBOOST. Segwit will disable ASICBOOST as a side effect of improving the protocol. Therefore, BitMain has been launching FUD campaigns and numerous attempts to propose alternative softwar…

>Segwit will disable ASICBOOST Incorrect. It would make 'stealth' ASICBoost mining improbable but still possible overall. > Therefore, BitMain has been launching FUD campaigns. Substantiate your claim. > proven to be due to spam Show it. Just show it already. Its a transparent blockchain but no one can show this spam, identify how it is malicious, show where it is coming from. Show the spam already. Like ASICBoost it…

Btc noob: What's wrong with asicboost? Is it just because it's patented?

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#349

Post by SeoxyS »

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.

Why not just use Stellar or Ripple at this point? That's exactly what it was designed to solve. And it has the benefit of being able to use, you know, real currencies. So you can go to your coffee shop, instantly spend $5, and be done without having to worry about what the price of a bitcoin (or in this case, lumen) is.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#350

Post by spiralx »

VMG wrote: post #141
spiralx wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which doesn't actually exist yet, and doesn't solve the problem even theoretically: https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-...

The blog author and you need to learn about lighting network and graph theory. Edit: responses to the specific "proof" you linked https://medium.com/@murchandamus/i-have-just-read-jonald-fyo... https://medium.com/@murchandamus/some-subsidiary-points-on-l...

That's just a lot of hand-waving, if the author is so confident about his rebuttal he should be able to provide a model for it. This person did at least attempt to simulate something along the lines of an ideal LN, which showed that micropayments do not do very well at all due to the combination of fees accrued at each hop:

https://hackernoon.com/simulating-a-decentralized-lightning-...

This thread on the same story discusses other issues with LN proposals, one that stands out to me is how routing is going to work if all nodes are perfectly equal - routing on the internet relies on a hub model, seems likely that a decentralised routing protocol adds even more complexity and resource requirements.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14759965

The trouble of course is that LN is just a bunch of proposals right now, each promising to fix all of Bitcoin's issues without removing all of its unique features. When it actually exists then I'll revisit, but until then I'll treat it as another piece of vapourware.

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