Topic: bitcoin "unlimited" seeks review - page 3. (Read 16106 times)

The real question is where did Blockstream find a time machine to go back and bribe him then?

Quite the foresight by good ol gmax.

This bitcoin-dev post from 2012 by Stefan Thomas explains the philosophy behind BU exceptionally well:

http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2012-June/001551.html


It seems the idea was not really explored further until now.

The counter-argument given by GMaxwell in that thread?


Funny that would be at the top of his mind.

Even if miners got so rich that they started to revel in luxurious
irrationality, the "ordinary" users will have to count their pennies.
If the price discovery is allowed to happen unhindered, the fees will
not be exorbitant, but reflect the actual demand & supply.

Also there will be in all probability advanced tools to calculate the right fee,
similar to the current fee estimation functionality.
 

Advances in propagation will translate to increased supply of
block space, and that will be measured by the market.

It seems to me like you are missing the point. The advantages that BU brings are primarily political, empowering the participants of the Bitcoin network. From a purely technical perspective BU is not that different from Core or from the protocol today as a whole. Considering that you are not interested in discussing the political implications only further proves to me that you are completely missing the point.

That you think that a flexcap is similar to BU in regards to the blocksize only further highlights this misunderstanding. Flexcap if introduced by Core is a form of centralized economic planning, which history has shown us is ill advised. Flexcap will be charging miners for creating bigger blocks, this can be seen as a type of "taxation" or "fine", which would then be payed out to the next miner if they create a smaller block, forever adding a new incentive structure to Bitcoin mining in order to keep the blocks small fundamentally changing the economic policy of Bitcoin.

Almost all of the blocksize proposals so far have been forms of centralized economic planning. Since we are free to choose alternative implementations, these alternative have their own proposals and policies. We are limited in our choice however by the options that are giving to us by developers. This is like a form a representative democracy, with some of the accompanying problems that this creates. Singular implementations must decide on the vision and path for Bitcoin into the future, this is where some implementations have now diverged. Bitcoin Unlimited in many ways is different since it has transcended this debate, both small blockists and big blockists can arguably use BU, instead of dividing up into political camps and fighting over what the vision of Bitcoin should be, which would most likely lead to a split. Many of us can choose instead to allow the free market to decide what the blocksize should be in a more distributed and emergent fashion. Bitcoin Unlimited helps to further remove any barriers to this free market. Bitcoin Unlimited is also about disempowering developers from having a disproportionate influence over the economic policy of Bitcoin.

I can see why you might think that developers having more control over the protocol is a good thing. I can bite the bullet and say that this would most likely also slow down development, as I did in my conversation with Greg Maxwell. This can be percieved as being a positive thing however, making development in Bitcoin more conservative. It can also be argued that many developers are not well equipped to decide on the future of Bitcoin, considering that many of them have engineering and computer science backgrounds, these questions have a very large scope where the humanities also become important. I would argue that it is better that the market decides, I think that the wisdom of the crowd will always be better compared to any other form of centralized authority deciding for us. We can only lose our freedom by allowing others to decide for us.

I do think this is true, and if it was it would render rule by the economic majority non viable. The more invested a person is the more incentivized they will become in order to do what is best for the network and inform themselves, overall.

If there where fifty plus BTC of fees with high volume I would consider this a great success, large blocks are a consequence and a necessary condition for Bitcoins success, that is if we define success as greater mass adoption of the Bitcoin blockchain. It seems like you are more interested in running an extremely efficient network like a good engineer should, however there is more at stake then that.

The value of this can be measured by the market, and if you do not think so then you are disconnected with the reality. The market capitalization of Bitcoin directly influences the security of the protocol, when the price goes up the protocol pays the miners more for security, bringing more people in further distributing the hashpower.

I suppose according to your definition of a well running network there should not be many people using it and cloging up the blockspace. Since lots of people wanting to use the Bitcoin blockchain is an "enviromental hazzard"? This is why we need to limit blockspace and price most use cases and bussiness out of the ecostystem? I see it completly differently, when more people join Bitcoin it strenghtens the network, adds value, and brings about profound change in our civilization. I think we should allow that to continue to happen, keep the fees low and transactions reliable with an increased blocksize.

The limit I see with BU's market driven block size is that it supposes that every market participant is so poor that they have to be a rational economist. In fact the richer you are, the less you care about efficiency and profit, and you start to care about those higher level concerns

For example, the BU suggests that miners are willing to take a larger block when the fee is enough high to compensate for the orphaning risk. As a result, we would have many orphaned large blocks chasing for 50+ btc fee in each block. And transactions will often take longer time to confirm even if you paid lots of fee. This is the result of trying to squeeze every juice from the blockspace resource, an environmental hazzard

In comparison, if we have super fast block propagation and extremely low orphan rate, the network is much more healthy, and the value for this can not be measured by market, it is an environmental bonus on every user of the entire ecosystem

Wrong. I read it some seconds ago. You can combat his responses, you can try to destroy them, but if you try to make people think they are no responses and don't adress the problem, you obviously aren't trying to communicate the issue well and objective but to spread things that are not true. Play fair.

Here are the quotes:

--> he says that there is nothing like mining centralization, but only pool centralization. Criticize this argument, but don't pretend it is none.  Bitcoins natural game theory is that there are more honest miners than dishonest miners.


--> he says that an increase in the blocksize doesn't centralize mining. I made a similar objection in this discussion on page 3, but you didn't respond it.

Other than you taek followed the discussion and took the response serious. He claimed that the pool owner can force the miners to accept things they don't like, since they are a centralized source of power.

The response was:


--> If there are 10-20 pools cumulating the hash power of hundreds, it is distributed. We experienced what happened to ghash when they nearly reached 51 percent for some time. If miners don' like what a pool does, they leave. In the case of ghash they even left when ghash just had the chance to do something evil but claimed they won't do.

brg - the English language was on and left you a message:

"Please stop torturing me!!"

Your responses to him addressed none of his arguments and mischaracterized the rest of them, as usual.

Nothing to see here.

I countered the criticism of Taek and so did many other people on the bitco.in forum, here is a link to my response:

https://bitco.in/forum/threads/gold-collapsing-bitcoin-up.16/page-203#post-7395
https://bitco.in/forum/threads/gold-collapsing-bitcoin-up.16/page-208#post-7550

Hi PR.  I too had a mostly on-topic, albeit slightly aggro, post deleted by a mod apparently set on keeping the thread's decorum conducive to productive discourse.

So quit yer bitchin!  


EDIT: How close is BU to JR's block-market proposal?

I've always thought https://bitcoinism.liberty.me/economic-fallacies-and-the-block-size-limit-part-1-scarcity/ is full of great ideas....for altcoins to test.

It seems BU is just an abstraction onto which people like Frap.doc project their unrequited ideals, at evidence by the inability to get the story straight w/r/t whether or not BU follows the longest ("valid") chain.

Legitimate kudos to adam for moving the discussion here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/3zc6qg/review_of_shelling_point_protocol_selection_ideas/

Your arguments via oprah meme and appended "tard" might get downvoted, but they won't be deleted.

I am very enthusiastic about Bitcoin Unlimited and think it is a great idea. (Disclaimer: I am a big blocker, and see BU as the mechanism that will end up bringing higher maximum block sizes that can let Bitcoin scale with on-chain transactions. Anyway, my stance on big blocks is, I think, independent of my argument below.)

As Zangelbert Bingledack has argued before, BU lets users do something that they can already do, albeit currently in a more complicated way. Let's suppose a group of miners decide that a blockchain with 2 MB blocks is acceptable to them, and want to gamble that other miners and economic actors (like exchanges) will think likewise and accept such big blocks too. They can already upgrade to a blockchain that supports larger blocks by recompiling their own custom version of Bitoin Core where they substitute a higher value for the integer constant MAX_BLOCK_SIZE. If these miners command a minority of the total hashing power, they will find that whenever they try to relay a 1.9-MB block, it gets stalled among nodes that refuse to relay it and the block gets orphaned and rejected by the longest chain. Now they could keep on trying to propagate their blocks and use human-communication channels like this forum to try to attract other miners and users to the 2-MB camp, but there is something that will probably put them off and that makes it hard for this approach to succeed: the moral aspect. Right now, the more common view is that a block that exceeds the 1-MB cap is an "invalid" block that violates the consensus rules, just as would be a block that contains, say, invalid transactions or incorrect hash values. This leads to a situation where the miners sending 1.9-MB blocks out to the open will get rejected as "malicious" or "attacking" nodes. Any reputable mining company won't want to be associated with such antics, and will understandably keep their blocks under the limit to be seen as well-behaved legit nodes.

Now the great idea behind BU is that it completely eliminates this moral aspect by taking the maximum block size out of the consensus rules. Under BU, the blockchain becomes a parameterised family of N-capped blockchains. If BU becomes the main Bitcoin implementation, miners may freely choose to decide that they can support a 2-MB-capped blockchain or a 32-MB-capped blockchain without anyone shouting at them "malicious!", "attacker!", "you filthy rascal, impostor of a node, boo, boo, boo!!!". The moral aspect vanishes as it is now just as legit to adhere to any cap. Those who only support the 1-MB-capped blockchain will reject any blocks bigger than 1 MB, while the 2-MB-capped blockchain nodes may keep on trying to build a longer chain. It's important to note that the blockchain only splits when a subset of the miners advocating for an N-capped blockchain command more hashing power than those miners that advocate for M-capped blockchains such that M < N. At that point, two things could happen: a node supporting the M-capped blockchains may accept that a longer chain now has larger blocks and raise their M parameter to match at least N, the new proof-of-work consensus, or insist that they won't support such large blocks and keep on mining a shorter chain of blocks that respect their M limit. This might lead to several alternative chains coexisting for some time, but the ensuing chaos should be very brief as the free market will rapidly settle for one of them. My feeling is that this would be the chain with the higher block sizes and the larger proof-of-work behind it.

How will the growth of the block size cap happen under this mechanism? I think the pressure on miners to increase the limit will grow as the cap starts to be hit. As more users try to send (on-chain) Bitcoin payments, the 1 MB limit will be hit more and more often and a backlog of transactions will start to grow. This will lead to users complaining about their transactions being stuck in limbo and some negative media reporting about it ("Bitcoin network collapsing" and the like). Under such strained conditions, which we may start to see pretty soon, the Bitcoin price will take a battering in the exchanges with miners starting to worry about their income and realising that they're jeopardising the Bitcoin network and their earnings by not raising the cap. I could be wrong about all this, of course, but then it would be the free market which would prove me wrong by settling on a tightly capped blockchain. In any case, thanks to the mechanism that BU provides, raising the block size limit can be a market-driven smooth transition rather than an incessant and unseemly fracas among the core developers in the mailing lists and IRC channels.

We might need to think about moving forum because some of the people proposing the ideas apparently being "moderator incompatible". Technically I dont think it is accurate to say the clarity has been hurt by deletions directly, as far as I saw & remember contents of now deleted post no technical comments were deleted.  What has hurt clarity possibly is the refusal of people to participate because of the potential of moderation or clash of egos and moderators.

I do sympathize and dislike moderation myself, though there is a little irony in Peter R's deleted comment containing a proud link to his own heavy trolling of /r/bitcoin which is not exactly the way to encourage people to divert their time to review your proposal (moderator or not!)

I started a thread on /r/btc

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/3zc6qg/review_of_shelling_point_protocol_selection_ideas/

and typed up a summary of ideas explained so far (including the below one that I already read before starting this thread we're in).


I had read that one before starting the thread. It seems to be a different idea again not mentioned on this thread.  Maybe we should be analysing a set of features that BU proposes to combine.

Immediate observation with empty block ratios is that this appears not to work in the face of 4 existing network behaviours SPV mining, relay network, big pools and selfish-mining.


Dont recall if I read that one yet.


Ha after thought I figured /r/btc is the next best option given the egos and the moderators clashing, yes, see above.

Adam

It is not false with respect to any setting other than infinity (but your point is valid since infinity is a apparently a valid setting). There is never a guarantee that any Bitcoin node will converge to the longest chain in finite time, only eventually. The exact same guarantee applies to BU, though it may take longer to agree on a chain than other implementations.

That seems a reasonable result. Just need to iron out the details....


I wouldn't say they are 'broken' - there is a lot of misunderstanding about it, and due to the level of censure taking place on bitcointalk its difficult to get a clear picture of what it is about on this forum.

So may I respectfully point interested parties to the BU 'white paper' ( without having this post moderated/deleted as a result) here where you can digest the finer details. Additionally, the FAQ provides a higher level description of key topics. This should remove some of the guesswork which has characterised  this thread. Then present your thoughts or arguments on the unmoderated  /r/btc reddit or directly to bitco.in where they can be discussed.

There seems to be multiple different explanations of BU which is leading to some confusion.



Is this a hypothetical "unanimous agreement for a 2mb limit" of the miners or just BU nodes? So BU takes queue from a miner "BIP100 like" vote and combines that with a supermajority BU node vote to determine a new maxBlockSize limit?

  
Thus a simple majority of miners is the "BIP-100" like vote that would permit an increase if the corresponding nodes agreed?

  
My thoughts are bitcoin simply made the game theory incentive to merely discourage dishonesty by incentivizing miners at a greater degree to secure the blockchain than attack it. Why are we assuming honesty? I hold the opinion we should prepare for dishonest and malicious miners as a possible attack vector. This is why we need to focus on decentralizing mining much more.


  
Is this true? As far as I know only Luke-jr wants to keep the blocklimit or lower it. Peter Todd signed up to make an effective increase and the rest of the scaling signers want to raise maxBlockSize after all the other improvements are completed to accommodate the LN. Is this simply a misunderstanding because I repeatedly see this being repeated on that forum and on r/btc or do you acknowledge cores statements and are assuming dishonest intent?

FYI... regarding post deletions, the only posts being deleted should be offtopic or non technical related ones, which we welcome because after all this is the " Development & Technical Discussion " section. Please take a screenshot of any "technical" post if you believe there is censorship here.

Zero opposition from Adam against the deletions.