Topic: Bitcoin XT - Officially #REKT (also goes for BIP101 fraud) - page 16. (Read 378991 times)

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  

Agreed.

I absolutely share your thoughts here. It would have given some breathing room and some very helpful data to plan for the future. It also would have largely ended the bitter division that the community is suffering.

Well, I wasn't really talking about a event where the existing users would flood the system with transactions. I thought of a event where a lot of people would become interested in Bitcoin/join it. However, the example linked also applies. Even though that is a concern it is not worth risking the whole system over it. I do wonder though why the Core developers don't bump to 2 MB; if we consider all the research done so far I don't think it would have any harmful effects that (too) big blocks might have.

A single event like this?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3yfxm4/custodial_wallet_users_gated_just_waiting_to_be/

I agree with this as well.  It will be very interesting to watch how the process unfolds.

I've been trying to quantify the "forking pressure" and I suspect it will soon be strong enough to break down the 1-MB dam the is presently blocking the stream of transactions:

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.

Don't use this word just because you support that idea. There is nothing natural about the process that you are proposing.

It is not a problem and shills are trying to exaggerate the situation. However, one has to keep in mind that a single event could trigger a huge increase in the amount of transactions (we are not prepared for this).

Yes, I agree; that is the spirit behind Bitcoin Unlimited:

"As a foundational principle, we assert that Bitcoin is and should be whatever its users define by the code they run, and the rules they vote for with their hash power." -- Bitcoin Unlimited's Vision

Bitcoin Unlimited is a project designed to make it easier for node operators to exercise their free choice in this regard, so that consensus on issues like the block size limit can more efficiently emerge.  

It will be based on user feedback, but not something out of thin air. Users must physically experience the problem and send their feedback to change the current design.

Are Blocks Filling up, and Is That a Problem?

Nodes decide the code they run and if there was consensus amongst these peers that the block size should be increased then it would.

Is that not "bottom-up" enough for your liking?

I don't think anyone is suggesting that all nodes and miners should be compelled to stop enforcing a block size limit.  I think it's more of a question of how that limit should be determined.  Should it be decreed by experts in a "top-down" process, or should it emerge naturally through a "bottom-up" process? 

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

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

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

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)

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.

The fact that "no constraint" lead to "capture of the stronger" is a very intuitive and very widespread biais, but it's not something which have a strong empirical basis.

On the other hand, we know that protecting a system from the stress of competition turn out to be desastrous for the long-term survival of the said system, because prioritizing the protection of the weakest points of the system lead to fragility of the whole system. Confer Taleb's Antifragility book for an expanded version of that argument.

In a world without blocksize, we don't know how many nodes would vanish nor how many new nodes would appear, but we can be pretty sure that a lot of the existing nodes would upgrade, and thus the nodes network would be more resilient. Focusing only on the nodes that would vanished, without taking into account the creation of new nodes and the widespread improvement of preexisting nodes is a partial view of the problem.

Following the logic of protecting the network from competition to preserve the weakest points we should had limit the increase of mining difficulty to avoid mining specialization (it's obvious that the network would have been far less resilient).

Such cool. Much slang.  So few vowels.

why are you still hanging around with us old ph0rkers?  

here, have one peanut for you monkey:



isnt life a blessing being utterly stupid?

wtf are you talking about? how old are you srlsy?

you some kinda moral officer or egalitarian derp?

Let it go, bitcoin is not for you, and needless to go through all the hassle at creating some other altcoin.

go litecoin and dogecoin already kids. Grin

bouhou the kids are too late at the party,

all the domain left are bitcoinunimited.org, bitcoinxt.rog and bitco.in

It's shameful, myopic, and regressive... and totally within their rights.