Bitcoin XT - Officially #REKT (also goes for BIP101 fraud) - page 15.

johnyj

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Beyond Imagination

Quote from: BldSwtTrs on December 28, 2015, 08:03:24 AM

Quote from: johnyj on December 27, 2015, 06:39:20 PM

Quote from: BldSwtTrs on December 27, 2015, 04:18:12 PM

One of the famous false prophecy of Karl Marx is that the free market mechanism would be lead to the monopoly of few corporations (thanks to economy of scale) that would end up controling the world production.

In other world, he tought unconstrained competition would allow for large entities to capture the economy.

This is already realized in many countries, a few large enterprises controlled the production of almost everything in a country. And the best example is the fiat money creation, totally dominated by a few reserve banks, while from the beginning any kind of private currency is allowed to circulate

It's because of state intervention, not because of competition.

Quote

And the block size limit has nothing to do with free market, it is just a measure to prevent spam attacks, without this limit, a bank can jam the traffic on bitcoin network for months, so that no transaction can be done at all

A technical expert (a blockchain advisor making around 20k/month) told me that spam attacks are made easier by a small blocksize.

The fact that small blocksize helps preventing spam attack is something highly debatable, not a dogma like some Bitcoin developpers want you to believe.

Quote

It is very interesting that the longer you work with bitcoin, the more you understand that in such a decentralized system, true free market does not really work, it is in fact very socialized, since everyone's interest is tied to the strongest chain in the end. You can fork what ever chain you like but the value of that chain will be minimal (since it break the most important promise of bitcoin - limited total supply, any fork is inflation, bring in more money supply) thus make that move meaningless market Wise

So you think that the longer you work with Bitcoin the more you understand economics?
It's as misguided as an economists saying the more he studies economics the more he understands Bitcoin.

When you say that free market doesn't work because "such decentralized system is very socialized" you are making a false dichotomy and are showing your lack of understanding of what free market is (and therefore your inability to have a enlightened opinion about wether it is working or not). Market is not antitethical to socialization.
When you are taking about everyone's interest you are taking about market forces (it's interests which drive market behaviors). The fact that everyone's interest are aligned (which is anyway probably untrue) doesn't imply that free market won't work.

Then why are you here? You should listen to those master economists that have won Bank's Nobel price of economics: Money supply must be inflative so that it is good for the society Grin

BldSwtTrs

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Quote from: johnyj on December 27, 2015, 06:39:20 PM

Quote from: BldSwtTrs on December 27, 2015, 04:18:12 PM

One of the famous false prophecy of Karl Marx is that the free market mechanism would be lead to the monopoly of few corporations (thanks to economy of scale) that would end up controling the world production.

In other world, he tought unconstrained competition would allow for large entities to capture the economy.

This is already realized in many countries, a few large enterprises controlled the production of almost everything in a country. And the best example is the fiat money creation, totally dominated by a few reserve banks, while from the beginning any kind of private currency is allowed to circulate

It's because of state intervention, not because of competition.

Quote

And the block size limit has nothing to do with free market, it is just a measure to prevent spam attacks, without this limit, a bank can jam the traffic on bitcoin network for months, so that no transaction can be done at all

A technical expert (a blockchain advisor making around 20k/month) told me that spam attacks are made easier by a small blocksize.

The fact that small blocksize helps preventing spam attack is something highly debatable, not a dogma like some Bitcoin developpers want you to believe.

Quote

It is very interesting that the longer you work with bitcoin, the more you understand that in such a decentralized system, true free market does not really work, it is in fact very socialized, since everyone's interest is tied to the strongest chain in the end. You can fork what ever chain you like but the value of that chain will be minimal (since it break the most important promise of bitcoin - limited total supply, any fork is inflation, bring in more money supply) thus make that move meaningless market Wise

So you think that the longer you work with Bitcoin the more you understand economics?
It's as misguided as an economists saying the more he studies economics the more he understands Bitcoin.

When you say that free market doesn't work because "such decentralized system is very socialized" you are making a false dichotomy and are showing your lack of understanding of what free market is (and therefore your inability to have a enlightened opinion about wether it is working or not). Market is not antitethical to socialization.
When you are taking about everyone's interest you are taking about market forces (it's interests which drive market behaviors). The fact that everyone's interest are aligned (which is anyway probably untrue) doesn't imply that free market won't work.

johnyj

legendary

Activity: 1988

Merit: 1012

Beyond Imagination

Quote from: mayax on December 28, 2015, 07:32:28 AM

Quote from: johnyj on December 28, 2015, 07:19:14 AM

Another thing to be considered is the new node setup. Currently it is already a pain to setup a new node, it takes at least several days of delay in downloading and verifying all those transactions, it is especially slow for this year's data, you can imagine that it will be weeks after block size is raised to 2MB

No one knows what will happen if the blockchain continuously grow at 1MB per block, but I think it is already quite a large of stress even in a modern computer, you already need server level hardware to be a node without too much load (16GB memory, 8 core). If the block size is bumped to 2MB, I guess many of the consumer level hardware will not be able to run nodes

Imagine that if in future, each one block takes 1 minute to verify, then it means it will take 271 days to verify 390000 blocks, setting up a new node will take almost one year. Even if each block takes 6 seconds to verify, it is still 27 days for setting up a node

i don't think there are many persons who are running a node from their home by using a PC or laptop

Then it will be centralized to a few large data center thus very easy to be shutdown. So you can understand why some devs even think about in future we should reduce the block size limit. When you have double amount of blocks in another 7 years, the situation will just get worse

mayax

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Quote from: johnyj on December 28, 2015, 07:19:14 AM

Another thing to be considered is the new node setup. Currently it is already a pain to setup a new node, it takes at least several days of delay in downloading and verifying all those transactions, it is especially slow for this year's data, you can imagine that it will be weeks after block size is raised to 2MB

No one knows what will happen if the blockchain continuously grow at 1MB per block, but I think it is already quite a large of stress even in a modern computer, you already need server level hardware to be a node without too much load (16GB memory, 8 core). If the block size is bumped to 2MB, I guess many of the consumer level hardware will not be able to run nodes

Imagine that if in future, each one block takes 1 minute to verify, then it means it will take 271 days to verify 390000 blocks, setting up a new node will take almost one year. Even if each block takes 6 seconds to verify, it is still 27 days for setting up a node

i don't think there are many persons who are running a node from their home by using a PC or laptop

johnyj

legendary

Activity: 1988

Merit: 1012

Beyond Imagination

Another thing to be considered is the new node setup. Currently it is already a pain to setup a new node, it takes at least several days of delay in downloading and verifying all those transactions, it is especially slow for this year's data, you can imagine that it will be weeks after block size is raised to 2MB

No one knows what will happen if the blockchain continuously grow at 1MB per block, but I think it is already quite a large of stress even in a modern computer, you already need server level hardware to be a node without too much load (16GB memory, 8 core). If the block size is bumped to 2MB, I guess many of the consumer level hardware will not be able to run nodes

Imagine that if in future, each one block takes 1 minute to verify, then it means it will take 271 days to verify 390000 blocks, setting up a new node will take almost one year. Even if each block takes 6 seconds to verify, it is still 27 days for setting up a node

sAt0sHiFanClub

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Warning: Confrmed Gavinista

Quote from: RoadTrain on December 28, 2015, 01:44:07 AM

As a matter of fact, it does depend on block sizes as of now.

Not to mention the physical network environment.

Quote

On the other hand, I believe that will not necessarily be this way in the future.

Of course, if your future includes a radical change to the way bitcoin works, and by artificially controlling blocksize and RBF, then this is true. But if bitcoin were allowed to grow in a more organic manner, what factors will actually change that will affect block propagation?

Quote

Several proposals can make it possible to transmit blocks in constant-time manner between cooperative counterparties. Moreover, miners are naturally inventivized to use these proposed protocols to limit their orphan rates.

By 'several' proposals, I assume you are talking about Matts Relay? Miners are already incentivised to reduce orphan rates - what makes you think they aren't and need to be?

Quote

There are indeed some inherent costs to tx inclusion, but I highly doubt they necessarily should scale linearly with block sizes.

Why? At what point would they become non-linear? Give me a rough scenario where you feel the cost of adding an extra tx would start to become logarithmic.
(assuming you are not talking about miners in a swamp in Florida, USA, on a 56K modem with a 500mb per month limit... Grin

)

Zarathustra

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Quote from: sAt0sHiFanClub on December 27, 2015, 03:56:09 PM

Quote from: hdbuck on December 27, 2015, 03:24:38 PM

how old are you srlsy?

Such cool. Much slang. So few vowels.

why are you still hanging around with us old ph0rkers?

Different kind of users here. On one side, we have kid slang and meme generator posters like hdbuck and many other no names, and on the other side we have a Peter R, who's getting asked to write overviews for CoinDesk.

http://www.coindesk.com/10-must-read-cryptocurrency-research-papers-from-2015/

hdbuck

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Quote from: Peter R on December 27, 2015, 08:25:00 PM

Quote from: Lauda on December 27, 2015, 08:10:50 PM

Quote from: VeritasSapere on December 27, 2015, 08:07:24 PM

Essentially Bitcoin Unlimited is just giving people the freedom of choice, instead of this choice being made by any development team.

This is false. People make their choice once they decide to run Core (that's their choice; they could run other implementations).

I think what he means is that Bitcoin Unlimited has given freedom of choice to the people who didn't want to run Core (or who wanted to make adjustments), but didn't have the aptitude to code and compile their own clients. Along with XT, it's also created competition, which I think resonates with a lot of people as a sort of "balancing of powers," as it were. Of course, if people choose to run Core when given other options, then that is their free choice as well.

how many derps the bitcoin unlimiturd has set free so far?

RoadTrain

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Quote from: Peter R on December 27, 2015, 01:51:43 PM

@RoadTrain: do you believe that the time required for blocks to propagate across (and be verified by) the network does NOT depend on block size?

As a matter of fact, it does depend on block sizes as of now. On the other hand, I believe that will not necessarily be this way in the future. Several proposals can make it possible to transmit blocks in constant-time manner between cooperative counterparties. Moreover, miners are naturally inventivized to use these proposed protocols to limit their orphan rates.

The very possibility of O(1) propagation makes the entire 'natural fee market based on orphan costs' idea flawed in its current form. There are indeed some inherent costs to tx inclusion, but I highly doubt they necessarily should scale linearly with block sizes.

Anyway, even if this O(1) stuff is not really O(1) (it's a buzz I guess, works only in ideal circumstances), when these proposals are implemented, miners will be able to build a lot larger blocks at practically no additional cost. The outcome for non-mining full nodes doesn't look good.

arruah

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Activity: 1357

Merit: 1004

I am using biticoinxt node.

puck2

full member

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Merit: 105

Quote from: iCEBREAKER on October 23, 2015, 09:46:31 PM

At least use a VPN. Cheesy

I can't figure out how to run a node through PIA VPN. Should I use their SOCKS5 proxy option? Will my node traffic automatically be routed through the VPN if I am running the PIA client software?

Peter R

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Quote from: Lauda on December 27, 2015, 08:10:50 PM

Quote from: VeritasSapere on December 27, 2015, 08:07:24 PM

Essentially Bitcoin Unlimited is just giving people the freedom of choice, instead of this choice being made by any development team.

This is false. People make their choice once they decide to run Core (that's their choice; they could run other implementations).

I think what he means is that Bitcoin Unlimited has given freedom of choice to the people who didn't want to run Core (or who wanted to make adjustments), but didn't have the aptitude to code and compile their own clients. Along with XT, it's also created competition, which I think resonates with a lot of people as a sort of "balancing of powers," as it were. Of course, if people choose to run Core when given other options, then that is their free choice as well.

VeritasSapere

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Quote from: Lauda on December 27, 2015, 08:10:50 PM

Quote from: VeritasSapere on December 27, 2015, 08:07:24 PM

Yes, there is a simple GUI where you can select several different variables within the client itself. Including max block size generated, max accepted blocksize and block depth. It is able of tracking a fork and once it reaches a particular block depth it can switch over. This all depends on the settings that the user chooses. By default Bitcoin Unlimited will behave exactly like Core until the majority of the hashpower starts to mine larger blocks.

Interesting. What is preventing entities from cheating the system by running thousands of clients with bogus votes?

It is the miners that create new blocks, that is what counts, nodes simply choose whether to follow the miners or not. Nodes can be spoofed, proof of work can not, this is why it works.

Quote from: Lauda on December 27, 2015, 08:10:50 PM

Quote from: VeritasSapere on December 27, 2015, 08:07:24 PM

Essentially Bitcoin Unlimited is just giving people the freedom of choice, instead of this choice being made by any development team.

This is false. People make their choice once they decide to run Core (that's their choice; they could run other implementations).

Having several viable options between multiple implementations, does enable people to have the freedom of choice, which is similar to a representative democracy. However Bitcoin Unlimited is different in regards to the blocksize, it can be more accurately described as a more direct form of democracy, which I would argue is superior.

Lauda

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Terminated.

Quote from: VeritasSapere on December 27, 2015, 08:07:24 PM

Yes, there is a simple GUI where you can select several different variables within the client itself. Including max block size generated, max accepted blocksize and block depth. It is able of tracking a fork and once it reaches a particular block depth it can switch over. This all depends on the settings that the user chooses. By default Bitcoin Unlimited will behave exactly like Core until the majority of the hashpower starts to mine larger blocks.

Interesting. What is preventing entities from cheating the system by running thousands of clients with bogus votes?

Quote from: VeritasSapere on December 27, 2015, 08:07:24 PM

Essentially Bitcoin Unlimited is just giving people the freedom of choice, instead of this choice being made by any development team.

This is false. People make their choice once they decide to run Core (that's their choice; they could run other implementations).

VeritasSapere

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Activity: 546

Merit: 500

Quote from: Lauda on December 27, 2015, 04:23:15 PM

Quote from: VeritasSapere on December 27, 2015, 01:52:58 PM

It seems like you do not get it, everyone essentially can decide the blocksize for themselves under Bitcoin Unlimited, it takes this power away from centralized development teams. In effect this would have to be a negotiation between the miners and the economic majority.

You're the one who doesn't get the question. Since 'everyone can decide', it doesn't answer my question. My question is how? (e.g. voting within the software or something)

Yes, there is a simple GUI where you can select several different variables within the client itself. Including max block size generated, max accepted blocksize and block depth. It is capable of tracking a fork and once it reaches a particular block depth it can switch over. This all depends on the settings that the user chooses. By default Bitcoin Unlimited will behave exactly like Core until the majority of the hashpower starts to mine larger blocks. Essentially Bitcoin Unlimited is just giving people the freedom of choice, instead of this choice being made by any development team.

Cconvert2G36

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Quote from: johnyj on December 27, 2015, 07:56:12 PM

Quote from: Cconvert2G36 on December 27, 2015, 07:44:04 PM

Quote from: johnyj on December 27, 2015, 07:34:19 PM

Quote from: Cconvert2G36 on December 27, 2015, 07:20:20 PM

In your scenario they would need a huge amount of hashing power to actually make their own giant blocks

I guess you only need to construct such a specific block that takes forever to verify, not necessary a valid mined block, no hash power is needed

An economically rational miner wouldn't sit there trying to validate an invalid block forever... they won't stay a miner for long. They'll set their own limits and seek the longest chain of valid POW. They already mine short coinbase only blocks simply due to fear of orphan risk.

If you look at the coinwallet.eu September attack, they did not do anything, just give out coins that stored in millions of dust addresses, and people automatically come to construct special transactions to claim those coins. This is similar to throwing out millions of $20 notes from the top of Empire State Building, it will immediately jam the traffic of Manhattan. How do you prevent people from claiming those notes? In fact F2pool is the one who claimed a mass of those coins and get a block took 30 seconds to verify

F2Pool did that block to clean it up. I guess there is always the obscurity option for attack resilience.

johnyj

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Activity: 1988

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Beyond Imagination

Quote from: Cconvert2G36 on December 27, 2015, 07:44:04 PM

Quote from: johnyj on December 27, 2015, 07:34:19 PM

Quote from: Cconvert2G36 on December 27, 2015, 07:20:20 PM

In your scenario they would need a huge amount of hashing power to actually make their own giant blocks

I guess you only need to construct such a specific block that takes forever to verify, not necessary a valid mined block, no hash power is needed

An economically rational miner wouldn't sit there trying to validate an invalid block forever... they won't stay a miner for long. They'll set their own limits and seek the longest chain of valid POW. They already mine short coinbase only blocks simply due to fear of orphan risk.

If you look at the coinwallet.eu September attack, they did not do anything, just give out coins that stored in millions of dust addresses, and people automatically come to construct special transactions to claim those coins. This is similar to throwing out millions of $20 notes from the top of Empire State Building, it will immediately jam the traffic of Manhattan. How do you prevent people from claiming those notes? In fact F2pool is the one who claimed a mass of those coins and get a block took 30 seconds to verify

Cconvert2G36

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Activity: 392

Merit: 250

Quote from: johnyj on December 27, 2015, 07:34:19 PM

Quote from: Cconvert2G36 on December 27, 2015, 07:20:20 PM

In your scenario they would need a huge amount of hashing power to actually make their own giant blocks

I guess you only need to construct such a specific block that takes forever to verify, not necessary a valid mined block, no hash power is needed

An economically rational miner wouldn't sit there trying to validate an invalid block forever... they won't stay a miner for long. They'll set their own limits and seek the longest chain of valid POW. They already mine short coinbase only blocks simply due to fear of orphan risk.

johnyj

legendary

Activity: 1988

Merit: 1012

Beyond Imagination

Quote from: Cconvert2G36 on December 27, 2015, 07:20:20 PM

In your scenario they would need a huge amount of hashing power to actually make their own giant blocks

I guess you only need to construct such a specific block that takes forever to verify, not necessary a valid mined block, no hash power is needed

Cconvert2G36

sr. member

Activity: 392

Merit: 250

Quote from: johnyj on December 27, 2015, 07:10:18 PM

Quote from: Cconvert2G36 on December 27, 2015, 06:55:33 PM

Quote from: johnyj on December 27, 2015, 06:39:20 PM

And the block size limit has nothing to do with free market, it is just a measure to prevent spam attacks, without this limit, a bank can jam the traffic on bitcoin network for months, so that no transaction can be done at all

This makes no sense. The current limit basically provides a lower bar for the nefarious banking institution organizing the attack. The attacker has less room to fill to effectively price out all other transactions. It makes the attack cheaper.

I have heard arguments that the limit should be used to "foster the growth of a fee market" which really means raising tx prices via an artificial, centrally planned, capacity limit. Miners, the producers of new block space, should determine the optimum size blocks to create while accounting for orphan risk and the health of the entire network. Harm the network and they harm their future earning potential. Create a huge block that takes forever to verify, be prepared to be orphaned by a chain of smaller blocks.

max-block-size, if necessary at all, should be a circuit breaker or malicious miner protection only. Not an economic policy tool. Satoshi understood free market incentives, he designed the system around them, they should be allowed to work.

Attacks being cheaper or expensive means nothing for malicious large institutions, but if they are unable to stop the normal function of bitcoin network, then the attack is just wasted resource. A large block gives attacker such possibility to stop the traffic of all nodes because all they need to do is sending out large blocks that takes forever to verify (You don't know how long to verify a block unless you have already verified it), and if they control some super nodes that can quickly verify such kind of blocks, that will give them more chance to orphan the rest of the network since no one is able to keep up with their verifying speed

Of course this special kind of dust sweeping block can be prevented at nodes level, but currently there is no fix yet as I know. And when you start to police on what kind of transaction is illicit then you really start to act like a government organization Wink

In your scenario they would need a huge amount of hashing power to actually make their own giant blocks. If that's the case... we've got bigger problems than block size, and they could do much more destructive things than just a big block attack.

A simpler, and cheaper attack would just be to waste some btc on fees to completely fill 1MB blocks, pricing out everyone else...

The only security against nation states with hundreds of billions of $ at their disposal is either through obscurity (monero) or through ubiquity (too big and important to attack).

Topic: Bitcoin XT - Officially #REKT (also goes for BIP101 fraud) - page 15. (Read 378991 times)