Topic: Bitcoin 20MB Fork - page 116. (Read 154790 times)

It won't stop tomorrow dude, how much about bitcoin do you know?

Imagine Apple selling $100k iPhones to 4,000 people.  Duh.

like supporting ed25519 which is orders of magnitude faster than ECDSA+secp256k1

It won't stop tomorrow dude, how much about bitcoin do you know?

You get fees up by allowing more fee paying transactions, not preventing them happening.  Imagine Apple selling $100k iPhones to 4,000 people.  Duh.

I've got a rough idea, but no idea about the techniques.  I also have an out-standing question about the behavior of SPV clients like Multibit in some of these fork war scenarios.  No one has been inclined to comment.

I believe that the safest thing to do is to just sit on the sidelines and neither get rid of nor obtain Bitcoin if you are able to do this (e.g., you don't run a business which involves Bitcoin or whatever.)  If you wish to try to make some extra bucks then you would really have to understand things well and be paying attention...but what one person gains another loses so doing this may be closely related to theft.  Not sure yet.  It is unlikely that whatever fork survives (and I expect 'gavincoin' and 'mpcoin' to be just two of many vying for position) will not nuke value buried below the fork in the chain which makes sitting on your hands and waiting out the storm a pretty safe and low-overhead thing to do.

Some of the forks may eventually do a forced spend.  Of course you would just send money to yourself for the most part, but the transaction would be able to be re-played on other forks.  How big a deal that is is questionable because you would control the key to the receiving address.  If you have deeply buried coins then your spends should not contain any post-fork coinbase and be legal on most of the forks.  That gets back to my earlier musings about making cosmetic changes to legal/illegal address definitions.  In this way you could spend to a newly legal address, say, and the transaction could not be replayed on other forks.

Lots of this stuff is just theoretical and hand-waving on my part.  If/when a fork looks more eminent I'll be digging into it some more.  I've been concerned about the fork for a couple of years now, but it has come to naught so far.  But just the threat of it has been a force pushing me to draw down my stash when selling opportunities come about.  Seems that there is an up-swell in the Bitcoin Foundation interest in forking ASAP though.  It feels desperate and political more than technical to me.

Obviously if something as major as a hard fork was considered there's many other changes that should be considered at the same time, what other no-brainer changes would be likely?

Currently the fees are very, very, very far from being anywhere near of an amount sufficient to secure the network.
We're all having a free lunch right now, due to coins still being minted, but if that was to stop tomorrow, the network would be in an extremely shitty state.

Have a read.

Its from when the 250kb cap in the reference client was lifted (not a soft fork, my bad) and the arguments are still valid, Peter Todd describes the issue of propagation times leading to centralisation with larger blocks in the first post and its a lot easier to understand than most discussions on it.

The issue isn't as simple as 7tps v 140tps, if it was it would be a no brainer. 45000tps is possible if space was the only issue but network propagation already allow some degree of gaming by miners and raising to even 140tps makes it a much more serious issue.

Any more "for dummies" info on that would be appreciated, most I've read so far is way over my head.

Also, I used to read their logs on IRC, and there was a guy called 'pankkake' (also in btctalk) who seems to have vanished.
I think its because they disagreed regarding the fork thing, so if anyone could share the light on his views, that'd be interesting too since I used to value his thoughts.

#bitcoin-assets is not a cult, but it is full of cults (that might qualify as “cargo cults”).

Cults that are poorly informed. The systemd debate (by people who never wrote an init script in their lives), or the bitcoin version debate (as it turns out, even though it was abundantly repeated, those old versions aren’t used, and don’t even sync without exploding) are just examples. I am largely unaffected by both debates, I easily can chose between all of those (and am currently running the luke-jr antispam patch on my nodes).

I’m not sure how to interpret http://trilema.com/2014/the-usg-wasted-another-hundred-million-dollars-it-previously-stole-from-average-hard-working-us-citizens-nobody-cares/ but this certainly sounds cultish. I don’t care if it is true or not, and I didn’t partake in this bet for many reasons. But this sounds like altering reality when it doesn’t fit your way, the socialist specialty. And it smells of bagholding; I wonder what would happen if BTC falls gain, will the price be “wrong”?

I left because I realized challenging cults would be fruitless, so would arguing about why I left (amusingly, a circular argument that works). It just smells too much of circlejerks and (lately) bagholding. I cut my losses (mostly not-financial, though the last weeks I was staying only because I was waiting for someone to buy my way out of MPIF). And I should have kept my mouth shut.

I also sold a significant part of my bitcoins (I planned to write about it on my blog, but real life issues make it unlikely). Bitcoin is way too full of idiots and evil people. Even though #bitcoin-assets stands out, it doesn’t mean it’s always right because others suck. Conversely, it’s not because fiat sucks that Bitcoin will crush it; fiat will just crush itself and there’s no clear winner yet.

I also don’t see any opportunities arising. The “project” I had went nowhere, and when I see what happened with the others, I’m glad it died early (though it was actually MP who stopped responding first, go figure). And with the focus of the Bitcoin “community” on all the wrong things, it would probably never have worked anyway.

Coinjoin helps, but I have my doubts that it will ever be used for the majority of transactions. The only Bitcoin wallet that I am aware of that tries to use coinjoin by default is the highly experimental Darkwallet (not to be confused with Darkcoin

please explain

What's wrong?

Lets say those million dollar transactions are 250 bytes.  That is 4,000 of them in a 1MB block.

So $40,000 total reward to the miner -- about eight times current block reward.

BUT YOU ARE SECURING TRANSACTIONS WORTH SOMETHING LIKE 2,000 TIMES MORE VALUABLE THAN TODAY'S TRANSACTIONS (estimated average transaction USD value for today's average transaction is about $380). And I GUARANTEE that attackers would have a much easier time pulling off a double-spend of one million-dollar transaction than 1,000 $1,000 transactions.

The math for "large value transactions will generate enough fees to secure the chain" just doesn't work.
The math for "lots of small transactions will generate enough fees to secure the chain" might.

Also:

I still haven't heard a coherent argument on why large value transactions are necessarily also high-fee transactions.

I'd suggest you go research existing high-value-payment networks and see what typical fees are for multi-million dollar transactions. FEDWIRE is running at 6 transactions per second, average transaction value over $6million, with fees per transaction UNDER ONE DOLLAR.

Why? Because if you are giving somebody one million dollars for something, you almost certainly have built up real-world trust, and probably have a longstanding relationship, signed contracts, etc etc.

If you think Bitcoin is different, please explain the scenario where I send a stranger who I don't trust (so have to rely completely on the blockchain) $1million for something.

Economic Fallacies and the Block Size Limit, part 1: Scarcity
By Justus Ranvier from Bitcoinism link Jan 21, 2015

http://d268xzw51cyeyg.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/961/2015/01/supply-demand.jpg

The average size of a block is approaching the 1 MB protocol limit for the first time in Bitcoin’s history, and not everybody agrees regarding what to do about it. Many objections to raising or removing the block size limit are based on misunderstandings about the nature of economic scarcity and operation of markets in general.


Production Quotas

As you may have heard, Bitcoin usage is growing. In every way, that graph represents the kind of healthy exponential adoption that we all want to see.

Unfortunately there’s a problem on the horizon which threatens to stop or even reverse Bitcoin adoption.

Several years ago, Satoshi added a protocol limit to the maximum size of a Bitcoin block. Prior to this change, there was no explicit limit, just an implicit 32 megabyte maximum message size. This limit was explained as a temporary anti-spam measure, and Satoshi said at the time that it could be raised when the network needed the additional capability.

The economic effect of having a maximum block size is that of a production quota. Production quotas are tools of economic central planning that either mandate or limit the amount of production of a good or service, as opposed to allowing the production rates to be governed by supply and demand.

Production quotas are inherently harmful to an economy, as shown in the 1920 essay, “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth,” and so do not represent a sustainable long term strategy for allocating the supply of Bitcoin transactions.

From the time it was implemented until now, the harm caused by the block size limit has been hypothetical rather than real since there has not yet been enough demand for Bitcoin transactions to be hampered by the limit. For the last few years, the block size limit has been like a minimum wage law that forbids salaries lower than $0.01 per year. There is no market demand for salaries that low, and so such a minimum wage law might as well not exist – it has no effect on the economy. Likewise, the 1 MB block size limit has not yet had any effect on the Bitcoin economy since there has not yet been a market demand for more than 1 MB of transactions every 10 minutes.

Since its inception, Bitcoin has been operating as if there was no block size limit at all. If this limit is kept in place when the market demand for transactions rises above 1 MB/10 minutes, then suddenly Bitcoin will be in uncharted economic territory.

People will want to use Bitcoin, but they will be forbidden by protocol from doing so. No matter how much they are willing to pay, no matter how willing miners are to include their transactions in a block, no matter how willing the full node operators are to forward their transactions, they simply won’t be allowed to transact.

A block size limit that is low enough to have a real effect on actual block sizes is the ultimate blacklist.

 

The Alternative to Central Planning

The best alternative to a production quota on Bitcoin transactions is, like in any other situation of central planning, to allow the market to decide the optimum block size.

Nobody gives McDonalds a maximum number of Big Macs they are allowed to produce each day – their customers tell them how many they want to buy and McDonalds responds appropriately. At any given time, there exists a price at which the willingness of McDonalds to produce Big Macs is exactly equal to the willingness of their customers to buy them, and that determines the number that will be produced. The process of price discovery is an emergent property of the actions of millions of independent actors expressing their preferences in a competitive open market.

This is exactly how we want Bitcoin to behave. The Bitcoin network, like any other product or service in the economy, should change its production capability to respond to supply and demand.

It is not currently designed to do this, however, and one of the barriers preventing Bitcoin from being improved in this way is a series of economic fallacies or misconceptions that cause otherwise skilled people to distrust market-driven price discovery over central planning, or to assume that resource allocation in computer networks operates in a manner fundamentally different than resource allocation in any other part of the economy.

 

Objections to Market-Determined Block Sizes

“Transaction fees are too low and won’t rise unless space in a block is scarce. We need a block size limit to ensure block space scarcity and thus price transactions.”

This objection is based on a common misunderstanding of the word “scarcity” as it applies to economics.

In economic terms, something is scarce if people can’t have an infinite amount of it at a price of zero.

On the surface of the Earth, air is not scarce. It’s not scarce because every human can breathe as much as they are capable of breathing, without paying for the air, and there’s still enough to go around. Because everybody can consume as much as they are capable of without reducing anyone else’s ability to do the same, air does not require allocation. In practical terms, the amount of available air at a price of zero is infinite, therefore air is not scarce.

Almost everything else is scarce, certainly any services that require time and/or energy to produce.

The space in a block will always be scarce as long as our computers are still made of matter and still occupy space. Constructing a block isn’t free, storing a block isn’t free, and the bandwidth needed to transmit a block is not free.

There will always exist some cost to a miner to add a transaction to a block. That cost may be very small, but it will never be zero.

If transaction fees emerge from the operation of a competitive open market, then we would expect them to approach the marginal cost of production, plus a small profit margin.

“What if the the market-set block size is so big that only Google can afford to run full nodes?”

This is a real problem that could emerge, and is actually the reason that the block size limit was enacted in the first place.

The reason this could happen is because of poor P2P network design: miners do not need to pay the cost of relaying blocks throughout the network, therefore this cost becomes an externality which is not reflected in their marginal cost of production.

The solution to this objection is a better P2P network design, not a production quota that limits the maximum transaction rate.

A description of how to build a better P2P network will be the subject of a future article.

“What if the market-set transaction fee doesn’t pay enough for a hash rate that protects the network for well-funded adversaries?”

If there is not enough market demand for Bitcoin transactions such to pay for sufficient hashing power to protect the network, then Bitcoin will fail.

This will happen with or without a block size limit.

Since its inception, Bitcoin has been on a collision course with extremely well funded, entitled, and politically powerful interests. Its only hope of surviving this collision is by attracting a very broad base of support.

Bitcoin needs millions, and then billions, of users who demand better money. The demand for Bitcoin must be strong enough that they will break the law if that’s what it takes to obtain it.

The above strategy isn’t particularly novel or extreme – this strategy has been employed in the conflict between peer-to-peer filesharing networks vs the copyright mafia, and more recently by ridesharing companies vs the taxi licensing cartels.

When a new technology has to compete against entrenched interests on a non-level political playing field, civil disobedience is a proven effective tactic.

We don’t yet know whether or not Bitcoin will gain enough of the right kind of support it needs to survive.

We can say, however, that arbitrarily rationing the transaction rate is counterproductive toward achieving that end.

“What if competition results in the profitability of mining being so low that it drives out smaller pools and Bitcoin mining converges to a monopoly?”

This objection is a restatement of the natural monopoly argument, and is in no way specific to Bitcoin.

Natural monopoly as an economic theory has been conclusively debunked, and the same principles that explain why natural monopolies do not emerge from free market forces in classically-cited industries apply equally well to Bitcoin mining.

Rather than repeat those arguments here, anyone who is concerned about natural monopolies should read The Myth of Natural Monopoly by Thomas J. DiLorenzo.

“If the market should set the block size, why shouldn’t it also set the block reward?”

This objection is based either on a fundamental misunderstanding on the nature of money, or else on the misconception that Bitcoin’s value is not derived from its monetary properties.

Exploring these misconceptions fully will be the subject of a future article.

This concludes part 1. Future articles in this series will address the subject of how to build economically-scalable P2P networks, and why the block reward is fundamentally different than the block size limit.

...
But eh my aim here is just to preserve and be cautious with my investment in bitcoin. Hence not blindly jump in every new patch and fork..
BTW if one could make a step by step guide to prevent one's coin from getting into the forked 20MB blockchain, that'd be quite interesting.
Still got lot to learn..
...

My sense is that most things don't fall out of the sky and bop this guy on the head.  I'll bet that there was some engineering behind it so I'm not sure that 'thrilled' is a word which captures the emotion with precision.

I think that 'mpcoin' is a mistake from a PR point of view mainly because the guy bends over backward to be unlikable (and it is one of the admittedly numerous things he seems proficient at.)  Similarly, but for the opposite reason, 'gavincoin' would not be to top pick for the bloatchain fork.  Oh well.  I never did have much of a knack for marketing so maybe I'm wrong about this.

it would be the coins on the 1MB blockchain and as opposed to the 'gavincoin' from the forked 20MB blockchain.
(MP standing for Mircea Popescu.. - dam he must be so thrilled having the 'basic' bitcoin renamed after him XD)

I'm sorry, I'm kind of lost in this discussion, but what is MPcoin?

I'm sorry, I'm kind of lost in this discussion, but what is MPcoin?