Topic: ASICBOOST Aftermath: What Now Must Be Done? - page 5. (Read 3899 times)

asicboost should be showing a 20-30% advantage not a -1% disadvantage

Capitalism thrives on a free market. There is a reason monopolies are prohibited by capitalist nations where feasible, and a monopoly is where things are headed at this point.

this post is very clear to anyone that you not even understand what we talk about here.... what a crap
what has to do this with ASICBOOST? Ver is You?

what propaganda you talk about now? Is not propaganda that a single Miner with the most hashrate attack the majority of bitcoin developers and propose a crap flaw code that twice crashed in two months only by a simple call script?
Is not propaganda that miners refuse to enable an over a year tested solution again from the majority of bitcoin developers?
and is propaganda everything else?
Look man. There are three types of ppl with your opinion. Payed shadow puppets, tech blind, or trolls. You can choose where you fit there.

Did you read the rest of the OP?

Capitalism thrives on a free market. There is a reason monopolies are prohibited by capitalist nations where feasible, and a monopoly is where things are headed at this point.

lets see what the maths really tells us


i would have expected antpool to have a block % of somethin in the 40's while having hash in the 30's if all this gmaxwell PoW propaganda was real

SG not activated...wont be... has less support from miners than BU.

That's like me saying:  "I need a car"... and you saying "well you can have this 1942 ford pickup in my driveway that barely hits 45 mph... but you
can only have it if 95% of the neighborhood agrees..but right now you have to walk."

LN still needs big blocks to work (it says so in the whitepaper) .....why can't you see that Core is obstructing common sense scaling?  It's so plain and obvious.

I don't care about BU.... I really don't ... calling me a "BU shill" just shows me you've swallowed the propaganda.

BU is just one way to get bigger blocks.  There's classic, coreEC, flexcap, other ABC proposals, extension blocks..etc... segwit is
the least palatable on-chain scaling , its minimal, and miners don't support it.

just done some quick maths


* stats at time of post

hmm
looks like BTCC and F2pool are the ones making more blocks than their hash %
not the other way round

*for those wishing to question the numbers

A month ago I was explaining the attack on Bitcoin's SHA2 hashcash which
is exploited by ASICBOOST and the various steps which could be used to
block it in the network if it became a problem.

While most discussion of ASICBOOST has focused on the overt method
of implementing it, there also exists a covert method for using it.

An incompatibility would go a long way to explain some of the
more inexplicable behavior from some parties in the mining
ecosystem so I began looking for supporting evidence.

Reverse engineering of a particular mining chip has demonstrated
conclusively that ASICBOOST has been implemented
in hardware.

Due to a design oversight the Bitcoin proof of work function has a potential
attack which can allow an attacking miner to save up-to 30% of their energy
costs (though closer to 20% is more likely due to implementation overheads).

The suspicion was motivated by observing that SegWit was very likely incompatible with an optimized implementation if it--- which happened by chance, basically I was saying "to block asicboost the network could do something like " and then I realized the words I was saying were basically part of the SegWit design.
With this in mind many otherwise hard to explain facts clicked into place-- e.g. aggressive attacks on Bitcoin Core that started after the proposal of asicboost, arguments against segwit that seemed to make no sense, advocacy for "hardfork segwit"... and this justified further investigation.
I hoped to find a test that would conclusively show which blocks were using it, but this doesn't appear to be possible.
More recently the "extension block + lightning" discussions have also stricken people as inexplicable (since many thought that segwit was being opposed because it potentially facilitated off-chain transactions)-- but they also fit.

You're still buying into the propaganda.   Hang Jihan from the highest tree if you want... i don't care -- We simply need bigger blocks.

Welcome to capitalism.
Why is this a big deal?

"exploit" ... anyone is free to design their own ASIC... Given the nature of Bitcoin, I would say it would be wrong to enforce the patent and not let miners compete freely but that is for the courts to decide.

BU has nothing to do with this -- we simply need bigger blocks, this has been going back to classic, xt, etc... 1mb is BS, stop listening to core propaganda please.

For those who've missed it:

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-April/013996.html

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/mining-manufacturer-blocking-segwit-benefit-asicboost/

Summary of the situation: Bitmain has been producing and mining with ASICs using an exploit that gives them a dramatic advantage over competing miners. This exploit is incompatible with Segwit, so Bitcoin Unlimited was created to gin up the appearance of public opposition to Core and place monopoly control over bitcoin mining and the protocol in the hands of Bitmain and associates.

Fully in agreement. We may have averted a real disaster for Bitcoin in the shape of BU, but the plans for the next coup have already been made public, and all the blocksize obsessives on the forums have started the cycle all over again.

The honest miners should not be penalised for maintaining their decorum faced with adversity, but the risk of mining centralisation is still too significant. A staged move away from SHA-2 hashing must happen sooner rather than later to mitigate the risk. Miners can take the opportunity to halt their development of mining ASICs, and concentrate on making the transition to CPU mining, there's no reason why they cannot still compete in the marketplace using their other marginal advantages, which will still exist after chaging the PoW algorithm.


Isn't this the same as point 1, though? If the Bitcoin developers write the code, that is the policy, and it couldn't be any more clear written as code. In cryptographic networks like Bitcoin, the code is the policy, the code is the law.


Further to this, it's possible that UASF might not even be needed. Bitmain's loss in hashrate share resulting from gmaxwell's neutering of ASIC Boost might be enough to force Bitmain's hand. Segwit signalling might rise to above 50% from removing ASIC Boost's viability, and 50% BIP acceptance has a tendency to move to 95% very quickly, it makes miners and pools nervous that they may start losing block solution races when 51% threshold is passed.

My last 2 points just distinguish between (1) making the fix to the current problem and (2) making it clear that similar actions will be taken in the future to prevent the problem from recurring.

(I'm a quality engineer, and this breakdown just reflects our habitual thinking as we write corrective action reports and answer a checklist of questions about countermeasures and preventing recurrence.)

Summary of the situation: Bitmain has been producing and mining with ASICs using an exploit that gives them a dramatic advantage over competing miners.

Long term no cryptocurrency can survive and thrive in an environment where monopoly control is threatened or possible.

or blockstream can just admit that segwit isnt perfect by admitting that its 'fixes' are not guaranteed and that it does nothing to stop native spammers etc.

and for blockstream to reset their own snobbery and try to fix their own internal issues and try something the community can and will happily accept

however using PoW nukes, mandatory activations, fee discount bribes and deadlines, bypassing node consensus.. looks very desperate. they are too blind to ven ask why should they need to resort to such tactics..