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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

#91

Post by TheLoneWolfling »

im3w1l wrote: post #63
wmf wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That won't work due to checkpoints and even if it did work it would be the equivalent of nuking the entire Bitcoin ecosystem. It would be more profitable to do something like extending the current blockchain but charge 1% transaction fees.

Interesting. For the benefit of others unfamiliar with this. There is a hardcoded list of checkpoint blocks in the Bitcoin client. Any new chain starting before the last checkpoint will be rejected. https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1061/can-a-51-at... https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3114/which-block...

So in other words if a 51% attack were to mine starting before a checkpoint block, it would end up "just" hard-forking Bitcoin.

Re: It's Time For a Hard Bitcoin Fork

#92

Post by Sambdala »

TomGullen wrote: post #89
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…

Makes logical sense, unfortunately we've seen examples in the past of this logic not being adhered to. Take the poker site "Ultimate Bet", when cheating was suspected the line of reasoning against it (and the strongest line of reasoning at that)was "Why would they cheat when they are running a million dollar profitable business and jeopardise the entire operation for a bit more %?" Turns out they were willing to jeop…

In the case of Ultimate Bet it turned out that it was an inside job, but the individuals involved didn't necessarily share in the long term profits of the company, so they were able to benefit personally to the tune of millions, while most of the negative effects landed on the company rather than themselves.

Thankfully in at least two other poker companies (hint: the largest one and its sister company) it was made impossible to see someone's hole cards before the hand is over, which is what allowed the cheaters at Ultimate Bet to perpetrate their con.

It's my pretty firm belief that when it seems like an entity is throwing away a pretty obvious economic self-interest, there's probably just a misunderstanding of where the economic self interest lies in the parties involved.

Re: It's Time For a Hard Bitcoin Fork

#93

Post by wonderzombie »

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…

I notice you bring up the exact arguments that the piece addresses explicitly, yet you do not acknowledge this one way or another.

But the meta-reason is: if someone thinks they can get away with it, why wouldn't they do it? With that presumption you could even argue it's the rational choice. If you do it subtly, there's plenty of room for doubt. Furthermore, there are enough people who're invested for ideological reasons that, in the absence of strong evidence, all most people will hear is a lot of he-said, she-said.

More to the point, factor in any monetary investment in the scheme -- the prospect of collapse should a critical mass reach the same conclusion, for instance -- and the people who've invested have an incentive to stay the course. That incentive to maintain a good reputation cuts both ways. Reputation is a matter of popular perception.

Re: It's Time For a Hard Bitcoin Fork

#94

Post by scythe »

nullc wrote: post #37
a3_nm wrote: post #17

The article makes a pretty interesting point: Bitcoin's version of proof of work can be delegated, which makes mining pools possible. An alternative design could ensure that the task to solve is designed so that miners and pool could not trust each other, thus ensuring that pools do not exist. It seems like this is a pretty big flaw in how Bitcoin is designed, as its security relies on miners remaining independent.

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 theft, rather than overt. This would allow them to keep getting away with it (that "long term revenue stream").

I know this sounds sort of unlikely, but consider e.g. GHash functionality to identify and subtly interfere with the operation of automated tools (e.g. ZeroCoin) that make lots of bitcoin transactions. The less likely that human eyes will see a transaction, the easier it will probably be to subvert.

Re: It's Time For a Hard Bitcoin Fork

#95

Post by scott_s »

Aqueous wrote: post #82

Take a deep breath. Stop hyperventilating. Bitcoin has died a violent, crashy, gory death dozens of times at this point. It's in Bitcoin community's, and GHash's, economic interest that no miner exceeds 50%. That's all you need to know to know that this is just another exasperated hand-wringer proclaiming the premature death of BitCoin. BitCoin, RIP 2008 - 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, ?

It's in Bitcoin community's, and GHash's, economic interest that no miner exceeds 50%

But GHash does exceed 50%, right now.

Re: It's Time For a Hard Bitcoin Fork

#96

Post by duckingtest »

Proof of work can't be decentralized because it has almost infinite economies of scale - starting from the production of asics, and ending at mining farm cooling. It doesn't matter what you change, at the end, you're going to be left with one mining farm.

Re: It's Time For a Hard Bitcoin Fork

#97

Post by SilasX »

socrates1024 wrote: post #77
dperfect wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's pretty easy to break delegation I'd be interested to learn how mining delegation could (in theory) be avoided. It seems to me that as long as you have a proof-of-work designed around something that can be solved with distributed computing power, there may always be incentives for delegation and cooperation (especially to reduce variance). I'm genuinely curious to hear what other approaches can be used to "brea…

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 valid, will actually be used to claim a reward for the pool.

I'm not familiar with the work, but I assume there are validated zero knowledge proof protocols that prove you know a partial hash inversion of a particular quality, like the Pinocchio one referred to.

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.

Re: It's Time For a Hard Bitcoin Fork

#98

Post by Aqueous »

josu wrote: post #84
Aqueous wrote: post #82

Take a deep breath. Stop hyperventilating. Bitcoin has died a violent, crashy, gory death dozens of times at this point. It's in Bitcoin community's, and GHash's, economic interest that no miner exceeds 50%. That's all you need to know to know that this is just another exasperated hand-wringer proclaiming the premature death of BitCoin. BitCoin, RIP 2008 - 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, ?

>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 crisis, the great depression, etc....

Nobody wins if the entire system breaks down.

Re: It's Time For a Hard Bitcoin Fork

#99

Post by [deleted] »

josu wrote: post #84
Aqueous wrote: post #82

Take a deep breath. Stop hyperventilating. Bitcoin has died a violent, crashy, gory death dozens of times at this point. It's in Bitcoin community's, and GHash's, economic interest that no miner exceeds 50%. That's all you need to know to know that this is just another exasperated hand-wringer proclaiming the premature death of BitCoin. BitCoin, RIP 2008 - 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, ?

>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?

[deleted]

Re: It's Time For a Hard Bitcoin Fork

#100

Post by Aqueous »

scott_s wrote: post #95
Aqueous wrote: post #82

Take a deep breath. Stop hyperventilating. Bitcoin has died a violent, crashy, gory death dozens of times at this point. It's in Bitcoin community's, and GHash's, economic interest that no miner exceeds 50%. That's all you need to know to know that this is just another exasperated hand-wringer proclaiming the premature death of BitCoin. BitCoin, RIP 2008 - 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, ?

It's in Bitcoin community's, and GHash's, economic interest that no miner exceeds 50% But GHash does exceed 50%, right now.

...for very long
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