Topic: Bitcoin XT - Officially #REKT (also goes for BIP101 fraud) - page 24. (Read 378980 times)

Generally speaking, and using your short-hand notation, it's more the case that the former commissions the latter for projects such as this.

The suggestion, though, is not outside of reason.  The first thing I did before taking a position was to put some effort into 'figuring out how to destroy Bitcoin.'  I suspect that a lot of people who have something on the line (e.g., a lot of money/power tied up in debt-based monetary regimes) would do the same.

Early on we did see some panic on the parts of some of the monied interests and their tools.  I think it was some politician who characterized Bitcoin as something like 'a unique form of domestic terrorism.'  That sentiment 'went dark' to my surprise.  A direct assault on Bitcoin in those early times was one of the things I was hoping for.  The effect would have been to drive Bitcoin underground and make it focus on defensibility and hardening.  The result of that would have been that here in 2016 we would have had a Bitcoin with broader distribution in terms of infrastructure support and one which was more robust (at least optionally) at the protocol level.  And one with a lot fewer dip-shits in the userbase.  Ah well.  The downside would have been that I probably could not have taken my first payout up in the four-figure zone and I've enjoyed the funds that this opportunity provided.

At the end of the day, I have developed significantly more respect for the capabilities of 'our' adversaries.  There were a lot of dumb mistakes that they did not make.

However I do not believe that it would even get to that point in the first place, since firstly we would fork before that happened, and secondly I do not believe such a system would gain sufficient adoption especially compared to superior alternatives that would exist concurrently in the free market.

Again, a fee market does not fix this, a fee market simply priorities who is able to use Bitcoin and who is not able to use Bitcoin. There are losers in a fee market that become priced out.

Transaction-fee levels are not in any general need of being artificially pushed upward. A 130-year transition phase was planned into Bitcoin during which the full transition from block reward revenue to transaction-fee revenue was to take place.

It is a valid and rational economic choice to subsidize the system with lower fees in the beginning. Many miners, for example, openly state they prefer long term system growth over maximizing tiny amounts of current day income.

Higher Service prices can negatively impact system security. Bitcoin depends on a virtuous cycle of users boosting and maintaining bitcoin's network effect, incentivizing miners, increasing security. Higher prices that reduce bitcoin's user count and network effect can have the opposite impact.

Further, wallet software User experience is very, very poor in a hyper-competitive fee market.

On Tue, Dec 8, 2015 at 6:07 AM, Wladimir J. van der Laan wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 07, 2015 at 10:02:17PM +0000, Gregory Maxwell via bitcoin-dev
wrote:
>> TL;DR: I propose we work immediately towards the segwit 4MB block
>> soft-fork which increases capacity and scalability, and recent speedups
>> and incoming relay improvements make segwit a reasonable risk. BIP9
>> and segwit will also make further improvements easier and faster to
>> deploy. We’ll continue to set the stage for non-bandwidth-increase-based
>> scaling, while building additional tools that would make bandwidth
>> increases safer long term. Further work will prepare Bitcoin for further
>> increases, which will become possible when justified, while also
providing
>> the groundwork to make them justifiable.
>
> Sounds good to me.

Better late than never, let me comment on why I believe pursuing this plan is important.

For months, the block size debate, and the apparent need for agreement on a hardfork has distracted from needed engineering work, fed the external impression that nothing is being done, and generally created a toxic environment to work in. It has affected my own productivity and health, and I do not think I am alone.

I believe that soft-fork segwit can help us out of this deadlock and get us going again. It does not require the pervasive assumption that the entire world will simultaneously switch to new consensus rules like a hardfork does, while at the same time:
* Give a short-term capacity bump
* Show the world that scalability is being worked on
* Actually improve scalability (as opposed to just scale) by reducingbandwidth/storage and indirectly improving the effectiveness of systems like Lightning.
* Solve several unrelated problems at the same time (fraud proofs, script extensibility, malleability, ...).

So I'd like to ask the community that we work towards this plan, as it allows to make progress without being forced to make a possibly divisive choice for one hardfork or another yet.

--
Pieter

Indeed, Core has already moved past this issue and is moving on to better, more intelligent scaling solutions.

No contentious hard fork is getting merged.


The rest can fork off to their own altcoins for all I care.

By the way, a more important red herring, one you are yourself guilty of entertaining, is the premise that Core is responsible for the network's inaction in raising the block size.

Of course Core has no control over the code being run by Bitcoin peers and so it is a network wide decision that supports the existing status quo.

Again, if you find yourself in disagreement you are free to move ahead with your own altcoin.

It's not just Rand. The Freemasons and illuminati have been working against Bitcoin from the beginning. ...

That is exactly why I run XT node(s). I'm just an old man yelling at a cloud.

I bought something with bitcoin today because I was surprised to discover at checkout that it was an option.

I was pleased that I could spend my bitcoin on goods, despite ongoing attempts to undermine that use case.

Settlement layer my ass, just as information wants to be free, so bitcoin wants to be money. All the governments in the world aren't going to stop it, and neither is a group of devs. Bitcoin will be what it will be and attempts to constrain it will fail, arguing about blocksize is a red herring. Honey badger don't care.

On Tue, Dec 8, 2015 at 6:07 AM, Wladimir J. van der Laan wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 07, 2015 at 10:02:17PM +0000, Gregory Maxwell via bitcoin-dev
wrote:
>> TL;DR: I propose we work immediately towards the segwit 4MB block
>> soft-fork which increases capacity and scalability, and recent speedups
>> and incoming relay improvements make segwit a reasonable risk. BIP9
>> and segwit will also make further improvements easier and faster to
>> deploy. We’ll continue to set the stage for non-bandwidth-increase-based
>> scaling, while building additional tools that would make bandwidth
>> increases safer long term. Further work will prepare Bitcoin for further
>> increases, which will become possible when justified, while also
providing
>> the groundwork to make them justifiable.
>
> Sounds good to me.

Better late than never, let me comment on why I believe pursuing this plan is important.

For months, the block size debate, and the apparent need for agreement on a hardfork has distracted from needed engineering work, fed the external impression that nothing is being done, and generally created a toxic environment to work in. It has affected my own productivity and health, and I do not think I am alone.

I believe that soft-fork segwit can help us out of this deadlock and get us going again. It does not require the pervasive assumption that the entire world will simultaneously switch to new consensus rules like a hardfork does, while at the same time:
* Give a short-term capacity bump
* Show the world that scalability is being worked on
* Actually improve scalability (as opposed to just scale) by reducingbandwidth/storage and indirectly improving the effectiveness of systems like Lightning.
* Solve several unrelated problems at the same time (fraud proofs, script extensibility, malleability, ...).

So I'd like to ask the community that we work towards this plan, as it allows to make progress without being forced to make a possibly divisive choice for one hardfork or another yet.

--
Pieter

The few people running XT nodes (I imagine) do so in protest of the consensus paralysis experienced by the reference implementation. Stasis requires one vote, evolution requires all votes, an unnatural arrangement. There is a relief valve, and some have already grabbed it. 

Right on cue for this discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3xnchr/rand_corporation_is_researching_how_to_destroy/

The Chinese government could order the Chinese miners to only accept txs that are whitelisted (or not blacklisted) and to only mine on top of other China-approved blocks. Since the majority of the hashing power is in China, Bitcoin would become a China-controlled payment system at that point.

The only way to fix this would be an emergency hard fork, probably to change the POW. It might be that everyone would quickly come together on a hard fork. Or it might be that some parts of the community would veto a hard fork unless they got some other changes they wanted (e.g., BIP101).

It's also possible that some people would be OK with China making this decision. I see United Stations complaining about Coinbase for invading their privacy. Then others defend Coinbase as simply following government regulations. It's easy to imagine a similar divide if there were Chinese regulations on Bitcoin mining.

You're missing the point that it would take much longer for that "two weeks" to happen at 30% hashing power.

There's a variety of ways something like this could be countered, but that's not the point, if a full scale nation state attack happened, it would likely be coordinated and fairly comprehensive. Our former trajectory forever changed.

Anybody silly enough to run an XT node should just send all their coins directly to Uncle Sam now and bypass all the formalities, stress and hassle that lies along that route.

If a powerful nation state decided to launch an attack on Bitcoin it could likely do a lot of damage.

Thats pretty irrelevant to China currently having a lot of hashing power now tho. Current hashing power location does not effect (in any significant way) any states ability to pro-actively attack bitcoin.

You're missing the point that it would take much longer for that "two weeks" to happen at 30% hashing power.

There's a variety of ways something like this could be countered, but that's not the point, if a full scale nation state attack happened, it would likely be coordinated and fairly comprehensive. Our former trajectory forever changed.

This is tangential ... but why do people assign so much influence to mining. All that would happen in that scenario is the hashing power goes down 70% or so and confirmations take a long time for about 2 weeks (until difficulty adjusts). Sucks but not end of Bitcoin.

Whats the worst that could really happen? Am I missing something?

Do we really have security and decentralization today when a few phone calls from the PRC could shut the whole thing down?

Let's be careful with our arguments here. Nearly everyone supports increasing the block size. Arguing against people who don't support an increase is a straw argument that misses the point. The point, rather, is precisely how increasing the block size ought to be implemented. imho, the most insightful and thoughtful opinion on the matter has come from Dr. Adam Back.