Topic: [ANN][XCP] Counterparty - Pioneering Peer-to-Peer Finance - Official Thread - page 367. (Read 1276826 times)

PhantomPhreak is one of the two listed, and has expressed that he is only willing to do things under certain Bitcoin-hostile terms.

This quote is the unmasking. When I replace the first 'Bitcoin' with 'my' and the second 'Bitcoin' with 'me', it becomes obvious that Bitcoin is no longer decentralized but operates as a cabal. It may well be time to form Plan B.

Please distinguish between Counterparty "team" members (there are only two developers) and the supporters, fans, and investors (the rest of us) who are certainly feeling frustrated and confused, and can't always make sense of what seem like arbitrary rules.

It will not help move this dialogue forward if arguments and observations are personalized, and that is the case for people on all sides of this discussion. All of us want alternatives to the centralized, fiat currency systems that have profound social and economic consequences for all of us. If we can all just focus on solving the problem that we have, then we can help XCP, and, by extension, BTC, move toward achieving the social and political goals that are central to its founding and implementation.  

Luke, thank you for playing your role to the T The only way the cryptocurrency ecosystem can truly break away from the paradigm of "Bitcoin as sole superpower" is if people like you become antagonistic towards metalayers, chasing their valuable features off the Bitcoin chain and onto other chains, giving them a chance to differentiate and succeed in a way not otherwise possible if Bitcoin already offers those features albiet with worse stats (block time as action granularity)

Man i'm loving this.  No matter what happens users like me win, and it might be a great speculative opportunity on which fast alt picks up the metalayers.

Unfortunately, it sounds like the Counterparty team is not interested in being a teamplayer and working with Bitcoin development, and giving Bitcoin no choice but to activate self-defences.

dividends is a gigantic benefit that won't be properly appreciated until we do something totally crazy with it like we're talking about internally

Benefits for Bitcoin users
Counterparty provides us (Bitcoins users) the ability issue shares, pay dividends and trade on a distributed exchange using BTC (without the need for XCP). This is a valuable functionality for all Bitcoin users and increases Bitcoin's value proposition. It is not in the best interest of Bitcoin users to shutdown this valuable functionality. Especially when there are competitors like - - Ethereum, Nxt, Protoshares, eMunie whom will have asset trading platforms built into their blockchain.

I guess you are speaking for satoshi then?

I find your reasonings behind much of your arguments to be rather moot.

I get it, you don't want to force everyone to relay our data.
That is fair.
Also what you are arguing right now is that having 40 more bytes of storage will increase spam which... I'm not sure what your point is.

But obviously the future makes that argument moot doesnt it?
In the future downloading the entirety of the blockchain won't be necessary, due to pruning or redundant mirroring with integrity checking storage (a la Freenet or torrent) or even some selective blockchain transactional query type system. So who really cares if there is more spam in the blockchain? You won't have to see it or download it.


Heres an excerpt from wiki regarding Kryder's Law:

And from another site regarding Nielsen's Law:

So if downloading the blockchain and storing the blockchain is not the problem because we won't need to store the entirety of the blockchain in the future and because obviously we don't really need to worry about any increase in blockchain size going forward, what is your current argument? That today and right now this second you don't want an extra 40 bytes max per tx taking up space on your HDD?


Obviously the future of bitcoin does not entail downloading the whole blockchain. This is inefficient and crude to say the least.
So you want to stifle innovation now because of a perceived problem that will be rendered moot/irrelevant in the near future.
Do you not see that as nearsighted?

tl;dr: Bitcoin devs cut max bytes from 80 to 40 to reduce spam, irrelevant due to Nielsen's/Kryder's laws and the advancement of bitcoin technology in general.

I think this conversation should be viewed as the most bullish indicator for the future of fast-blockchain altcoins.  If Bitcoin devs don't want platforms like MSC and XCP build on their protocol, they're not the only game in town and the market is hungry for anything willing to differentiate itself.   Until a few days ago I did not see any future value for something like Litecoin, but with a 5x faster blocktime resulting in 5x faster action execution, there are already tangible advantages of being on a faster blockchain.

Add to that things like Florincoin where they already have a 160 arbitrary message field and a 40 second block time, and Bitcoins security headstart gets a little less compelling.  Given the option, I bet a lot of Scrypt miners drop everything to mine the coin that powers the most responsive, cheapest DEX and asset platform.  I know I'll be interested in it.

I want to hear more from topynate. Pass the popcorn.

Damn, that's brilliant. Where you been, "Newbie" topynate?

Let's have some figures, shall we? Tarsnap charges 300 picodollars / byte-month. Assume ten thousand full nodes with their own blockchain, that's 3 microdollars / byte-month, or 3*12*80 microdollars / year = 0.3 cents / year for 80 bytes. But of course the cost of storage falls exponentially, let's say a three year halving time; then the total lifetime cost for storing your 80 byte OP_RETURN on every full node in the Bitcoin network is given by the sum of a geometric series with first term 0.3 cents and common ratio 2^(-1/3).

That's a total cost of 1.5 cents. At current prices, and with the above generous assumptions made on behalf of miners and other full node operators, the correct maximum additional charge for a filled 80 byte OP_RETURN is 0.025 mBTC (it can be argued that the additional demand for Bitcoin created by permitting new uses is a driver of increased Bitcoin prices and thus should lead to a discount, but that's harder to quantify). So just set that as the default until floating mining fees are introduced in (hopefully) 0.10. Bitcoin users who don't want to "provide" that storage can go ahead and not run a full node.

The idea Luke-Jr raises occasionally of a social contract existing between Bitcoin node operators to store and process only financial transactions needs dealing with. Bear in mind that in his maximalist interpretation, absolute consensus between all node operators is morally required to change that contract. It falls through on several grounds, principally vagueness and lack of historical support. Vagueness we've seen in this thread: no-one is quite clear on what makes a transaction financial. Is a transaction transferring a currency other than Bitcoin part of the social contract? Is a transaction containing what is effectively routing data (c.f. stealth addresses) fully financial, or is the additional stuff an anonymity functionality not part of the social contract? And so on. As to historical support, allow me to quote from someone who would know:


The thing is, Luke, that like it or not, Satoshi is/was a libertarian, and his creation embodied the 'take it or leave it' aspect of that political philosophy. Consensus means a consensus of mining power. Coordination means passing around proofs of work. If you feel that the amount of storage space the blockchain needs is too onerous to justify running your huge mining network, then by all means take your ball and go home, or for that matter start playing a different game - you have every right to reject whatever blocks you wish. Bitcoin will be just as pure as the majority of mining power wishes it to be.

I agree that the blockchain isn't for general storage. I think there are use cases where the data is a) relevant and tied to the utility of Bitcoin and b) financial transactions. The 'cost' of storing such information should be structured in a way which is prohibitive to spam, encourages efficient usage of the blockchain and isn't arbitrary.

Let's not get into speculation here.

What kind of spam can fit in 80 bytes and not in 40 bytes? What kind of spam cannot be easily split across two separate transactions? This is a small thing that we're asking, and it would help a lot of people. It's not necessary for Bitcoin, but it's very useful for lots of applications like ours (which, again, are purely financial). Don't the benefits outweigh the rather small costs? I firmly believe that Counterparty is very good for Bitcoin in the long term; it as-it-were extends its functionality while being entirely backwards-compatible.

It's never appropriate to use the blockchain as storage.
Even if you pay a fee*, there will almost certainly still be some Bitcoin user who doesn't want to provide you with the storage.
If you want to pay people to store data for you, there's Amazon.
If you need to timestamp the data, merge mine a timestamping service.

* the fee to compensate for storage in the blockchain would far exceed Amazon's storage costs, btw

If the issue is spam control, then wouldn't that be negated a variable fee based upon based upon the level of risk that spam may be contained within the transaction? Such a variable fee in this case is non-linear to the amount of 'risky' data attached. It would remove the arbitrary nature of 40 or 80 bytes.

It is difficult to predict what is necessary or unnecessary in the future. What if I wish to publish into the ledger the the daily fixings of the history of a 500 million dollar notional interest rate swap. Perhaps at that juncture in the future we would decide it was inappropriate to be stored in the blockchain. However, if it was appropriate I would certainly be willing to pay a larger premium to place it into the ledger.

For relay, probably no immediate problem.
For mining, it encourages spam.
For long-term, it's unnecessary.

Edit: Except that relaying transactions which will never be mined is currently exploitable. So either that would need to be fixed first, or the relay needs to be more intelligent and only relay Counterparty transactions the same way miners would mine them.

I'm sorry, what's the problem with changing the limit in IsStandard() back to 80 bytes? I have yet to see any argument for why 40 is better than 80, and using the latter value would benefit everyone involved immediately.

I'm thinking collusion.