Topic: Bitcoin XT - Officially #REKT (also goes for BIP101 fraud) - page 198. (Read 378996 times)

 

He's actually excellent at making intelligent analogies and "dumbing-down" material for casual users.

Great, but that's completely irrelevant to the decisions we have to make. In fact it strongly suggest against removing entirely the block size cap so you should really stop pulling up this material as it absolutely does not support your position.

What you essentially propose is to see "how far" the miners will be willing to centralize toward "the most efficient network configuration"

My paper implies that the most "efficient" network configuration (at least from a superficial perspective) is a single miner in a large data center.  No one is disputing this fact.  No one is also disputing the fact that a monopoly miner like this has the ability to censor transactions and to double-spend (and earn a greater profit this way too).

Will mining centralize around one single miner?  No one knows.  This is why Bitcoin is still a risk.  

But if this doesn't happen--if there remains more than a single miner--then the fee market does exist.

Ive already argued in this thread against the fatality of any tragedy of the commons regarding fees in a no-subsidy situation.  So far, no one has refuted me.

Also, its laughable that Greg would attack Peter for using too technical of a presentation.
Practically every sentence Greg types is cryptic and technical. 

If you don't chose to make a rational judgment between the arguments presented your opinion is of no use here.

And it is, Bitcoin uses carefully aligned incentives to work around the problem. In fact, if you wanna accuse him of being wrong on this aspect, then you should realize you are making the same mistakes he previously did which is to examine the problem in a vaccum.

Your paper is fundamentally flawed because it addresses nothing resembling the current dynamics at stake in Bitcoin. More precisely it ignores the incentives for miners to centralize (as they have shown to have) to mitigate propagation times. In effect your paper clearly demonstrates it is more profitable to do so under free-floating blocks and you essentially rely on their altruism to maintain the validity of your model to make decisions going forward. In short, your work might be sound from a technical standpoint but can not be used to construct security models that depend on worst-behaviours assumptions.

I cannot accept that you could comment on Greg's game theory intelligence when you continue to wave away the clear negative externality present in your models. You chose to ignore the obvious tragedy of commons at stake and that is why your opinion can never be considered as long as you don't recognize the cost externalized to node and the overall centralization pressure suggested by YOUR alignment of the incentives.

I have to wonder if Greg is just trying to discredit people like Peter who threaten his intellectual high ground.
Comments like "Wow. bitcoin-development has reached a new low." really strike me as unwarranted emotionalism.

Greg claimed the paper was "fundamentally flawed" and asked me several times to publicly retract it.  Instead, I have examined his objections, and in addressing them, I have been able to remove assumptions and strengthen the claims of the paper.  

The fee market paper is interdisciplinary and really outside the realm of Greg's expertise: it is a mixture of physics and economics.  My opinion of Greg is that he is a professional cryptographer and programmer, an amateur physicist, and a lousy economist and game theorist.  Remember, he already "proved" that decentralized consensus was impossible...

No, it is referring to the same paper.

If you want to understand the assumptions that make any of what Peter has posted here wrong I suggest you read the above.

Sometimes it is nice to have two sides of the story.

Which paper of Peter's is Greg referring to?

I thought Peter is now arguing we don't need any block limit for a "healthy fee market".

Is this a different paper?
 

I'm just gonna drop this here  

https://botbot.me/freenode/bitcoin-wizards/2015-08-30/?msg=48477664&page=1

guess im orthogonal type too.

too bad they wouldnt dare forking off, in the end..

The paper proves that a fee market will exist if the information transmitted scales faster than O(log Q) where Q is the size of the block.  I then show using Information Theory that the information transmitted must actually grow as O(Q) which is much faster than the requirement for a healthy fee market. 


It's too bad Gavin used the word O(1) propagation in his blog post, because it's caused all sorts of misunderstanding.  In O(1) time, a miner can transmit a IBLT tailored for particular network conditions.  This will not in general contain enough information to allow the other miners to determine the contents of his block; there is a "set reconciliation" processes that takes place afterwards.  As you might imagine, this process takes time.  The net result is that the total time is NOT O(1).

There is a fundamental law that states that the rate at which information can be transmitted is limited to the carrying capacity of the communication channel.  Transmitting twice the information takes twice as long using an optimal compression scheme. 


I think you mean working paper:




The claim of the paper, and the math behind that claim, both hold. 

It is normal during the peer-review process for people to challenge a paper's claims and force clarification of the model's assumptions.  This paper was no different.  Through that process, I've been able to strengthen the claims of the paper, remove assumptions, and show that the fee market exists if only (1) there is more than a single miner, and (2) the inflation rate is nonzero. 

It would cleave the community and the bockchain into two factions and 'sources of truth' respectively.  At least two.  That might be awesome to say the truth, and the best thing which happened to Bitcoin since each group would not be slowing the other down as they pursue their individual goals.  In the case of Core vs. XT/BIP101, it's distributed security vs. a swarming attack on the mainstream monetary alternatives by masses who yearn for Bitcoin (or so they sometimes claim.)

I tend to have an orthogonal way of looking at things so not very many people seem to see the benefits of a fork as I do.

Hum sounds reasonable.

Altho BIP000 is not against any improvement. It is just a call for patience and observation:



Besides, what do you mean by "growth"? because undertaking as much transaction as visa/paypal would required ~26GB/blocks... so how would that be possible without endangering the network's security?

My point being the payment/tipping growth channel is not as realistic as the investment/secured safe haven one, for which fees are meant to be, even with a nice premium, so there would still be room for growth as of now/medium term..

It seems to be a complex question, which is probably why no one has rigorously show it.

There's an interesting dynamic based on the number of pools operating.  If there were only a few
large pools, then many people would pay the minimum that any of the major pools accept and
wait till they solve a block.  On the other hand, if there were a great number of small pools,
then people could be waiting an unacceptably long time before the smallest fee pool solves
a block.  That scenario would mitigate the price wars because it would disincentivize users
from price shopping fees and instead compel them to simply include a reasonable round number fee
(although pools would still be left with the dillema of where to set prices
and what to include).  

A recent article points to shrinking pool size:
http://cointelegraph.com/news/114918/new-cornell-paper-suggests-mining-pools-will-shrink-in-size

However, even if large pools existed, and one started dropping their fees, miners would be incentivized
to leave the pool for a higher fee pool!

Also, another interesting aspect of all this, is that when mining becomes less profitable and
hashing power falls, the amount of hobbyist mining and decentralization will rise.  How meaningful
will it be?  No one knows, but maybe 100 years in the future, there will be no pools and everyone's
refrigerator will be mining.

@Fencer11, I don't think XT will hurt anything.  It is basically an implementation of Bip101, but
some people don't think its the right way to scale Bitcoin.  Others simply don't trust those that
run XT.  Mike Hearn in particular, has said controversial things in the past.

Could someone explain to me in non technical terms why Bitcoin XT would hurt the Bitcoin community if it gained the majoority of the vote?

Well I do not partially agree with BIP000. Even though there is currently nothing wrong with Bitcoin, that does not mean that it should not change nor evolve. Basically, with the halving coming in less than a year we can not know what will happen. There is a huge potential for additional growth around it, however if Bitcoin is unable to handle it then we lose out on this opportunity. I would say that we need to work on possible solutions to make enough room for potential growth.
There's nothing wrong with discussing anything before other things happen. Besides, before we actually see some implementation enough time will pass to see how the network is going to handle the remaining months of 2015.

I'd say complexity and the fact that there are no threads about it in this very section. If you want to talk about it, then go ahead and open a new thread. I'll join as well.

Adam's block extension gives both sides exactly what they want.

I'm not sure why it didn't get more traction.

ok my bad, so what do you think of bip000?

As per your mixing view of BIP100 and BIP105, wouldn't you agree that before having such discussion, it would be better to actually witness how the market/miners perform as the network actually grows?
And by that i dont mean spam attacking it to push for some quick fix that hasnt been tested or properly discussed, which should take a while if we take into consideration the very fragile equilibrium that has brought us up until now.