Topic: Block reward <1 btc re-orgs vector viable? Eg Binance - page 2. (Read 550 times)

No. They are not flawed.

The argument  I make is when the block subsidy is very low versus the value of the fees and the value of BTC is high, the block size will have an impact on how secure the chain is.

At some point these function come close to a "minima" were there are not enough fees to secure the miners as the subsidy will be too low to protect the value of the coins in the block.

1mb or 4 via segwit seems to low.

BCH and BSV clearly allow for more onchain traffic thus fees. So for this vector it is less of an attack surface. However they may face centralisation vectors due to too large blocks.

I main maintain the must at a minimum be a g(x) = s-curve where the g(x) = a function of supply, as supply from g(x) increases. This provides a basal offset an pathway to blocksize

perhaps g(x) should also have some type of usage like bitpays bip for adaptive size blocks https://medium.com/@spair/an-adaptive-block-size-for-bitcoin-947fbc620c9b as well.

I fear that Core is politically wedded to 1MB and I have no issue with the 2X thing happening again.

GMAXWELL had no answer to this when I put it to him a few years ago and his silence has been deafening since.

For reference Satoshi had 32 MB blocks and he calculated hardware would keep up with bigger blocks.

Bitcoin needs both larger blocks and segwit. Both main camps have failed to accept this and the whole projects and society suffers.

The both need to swallow their pride independently.

Core has no technical or valid political argument against a s curve increase of small%

Then Bitcoin is flawed now, already. And BCH and BSV too
Because the "50x shorting attack" is already possible. With Bitcoin and all altcoins, including Proof-of-stake ones. Maybe centralized ones like Ripple could save themselves but I don't consider them really competitors for BTC, more for PayPal

As I wrote, the bribing attack would have costs of a similar magnitude than a regular 50+1% attack. You seem to have omitted that part of my post, and also bones261's stance that transaction fees could be even higher with smaller blocks because the "confirmation panic" (*F*CKSOMANYTRANSACTIONSLETSPAY1000SATOSHIPERBYTEH!!!*), which drives fees to da moon in highly congested times, would arrive much later.

Big blocks would not change anything. If any, they would magnify the problem, because lesser mining actors (pools and solo mining farms) would exist and thus the briber would have to deal with less parties.

So the hacker has unlimited funds to finance 2x 51%/re-org attacks and indemnify the miners for their hardware that would be trash in this case? Then he must steal the coins to Satoshi, at least

We already have a 4 MB maximum. I agree that doubling it is possible, but the problem is ... as you write, politics. Do you want another Segwit2x war? I could live without it

your missing the point thats a one of collateral effect of segwit

it is not g(x) = s curve function that addresses block size over time.

So  we drop to 6.25 in 2020   

We drop to 3.125 in 2024

We drop to 1.5625 in 2029   

Your example  of a hack killing the price in the year 2029 Is interesting.

But we have a lot of reasons for the tech to stick around.  Mostly in the form of mining hardware and renewable energy.

I Have developed a few solar arrays with buysolar and I am building a larger one as I type.
I know for a fact I am not the only one building these arrays.  They have 20 to 30 year life spans.  Once paid of (4-10years)

they are under 1 penny a Kwatt to maintain.

your idea would be really good for me as a difficulty + btc price crash would make my solar arrays all the more valuable for mining.

The two arrays we paid off should still be running in 2046-2050  so in the long run I would stand to make a lot of money if you are correct.

MY point is others with big pockets will see you idea and hedge with solar builds hoping to mine with 1 cent power on the back end of the 30 year life span of the array.  A setup that you explain happening would be good for all of us that build arrays now.

Fo me price sink to not support diff is money in the bank. So I would think guys that see this will have bigger solar arrays than me.

     I don't see any evidence that increased transaction capacity for crytocurrency necessarily leads to increased adoption. If that were the case, I would think many more people would have supported the BCH fork and then went on to support the BCH-SV fork. It appears that the only time those two forks can hope to get anywhere near their capacity is when they do a stress test. Also, a reorg bribe would probably be much cheaper and have a greater chance of working on those two coins since their average hash rate is pale in comparison to BTC. You would probably only need to bribe one large ASIC farm to go forward with a reorg of either of those chains.

    Also, as darosior stated above, when segwit was implemented, it already increased the block capacity, basically because the segwit signatures are kept in a separate location. I don't see why the Bitcoin Core team cannot increase the block capacity even further through optimizations or perhaps moving other data to separate locations. Furthermore, since they will probably do this as a soft fork, if people don't like the new improvements, they are free to use the older software and still be able to participate in the network.

Blocksize has already been increased to 4000000WU with 1 byte non-segwit data = 4WU and 1 byte segwit-data = 1WU. Most of blocks are superior to 1mb in size nowadays : https://blockstream.info/, https://www.blockchain.com/charts/avg-block-size, https://btc.chaintools.io/ .

[1] Does not matter to a malicous attacker, eg short btc 50x on bitmex or whatever, or govt or corp or whatever

[2] Does not change anything as the incentive system just means [1] again happens.


There is not reason not 2 2x blocksize now.

I think core is politically wed to 1mb, because if the increase blksize it admits defeat to BCH and BSV

ok, alts don't matter when BTC is at the front. Tran actions have capped out in BTC and its holding back adoption.

More efficient asics don't mean anything as the whole market gets them and they change nothing in relation to fees for support or attack vector



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I don't see another way out of this situation.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/sharding-strategy-held-together-by-atomic-swaps-5109561

I just discussed a similar issue in the German forum, but others convinced me that the scenario is not that dangerous. The reason was this paper: the authors argue that when fees become more important than block rewards, the chain becomes unstable and attacks would be cheaper.

But Bitcoin's security relies on the assumption that the miners responsible for 50% of the hashrate are honest. Even if more than 50% are dishonest, then there still the security model does not collapse, as the dishonest majority must preserve their advantage over a long time to be able to censor transactions, double spend and to do really severe harm.

There are incentives in place that this doesn't happen:
- First, the price would most likely crash, so miners' income would be drastically less. They could short coins to hedge against that, but that would have to be an extremely massive operation and certainly would drive up the price for borrowed Bitcoins.
- Second, the community could decide to hard fork with another mining algorithm, reverting the double spends. In this case, most users would switch to the new chain, and miners would lose not only the rewards they didn't convert to fiat, but almost all of their investment in hardware and infrastructure (they could mine the old chain and lesser SHA256 coins, but their income from these sources would be worth only a little fraction of the amount they achieved with Bitcoin).

In the "bribing attack" scenario, the general situation would be very similar to that of a "regular" 51% attack, because the hacker must convince a majority of miners to take these two risks related to dishonest behaviour. It may be a little bit cheaper, but not really so significantly that the situation would be likely to happen.

So the hack must be really an extremely big one (e.g. Satoshi's coins) for the hacker to be able to really do harm in this case.

Anyway, I also agree with bones261: bigger blocks would not necessarily mean "more fees". Second-layer technologies could even lead to more transactions than big blocks, and thus to more demand, and higher fees.

Most altcoins already have implemented increased block space. However, the only alt that I know that comes close to the level of BTC transactions is ETH. The only reason ETH has more transactions is because it has a use case to pump out shit tokens for a bazillion ICOs. I don't see how increasing block space will somehow magically make people want to transact more on the BTC chain. Besides, it will be 9 years before the block reward will be 1.5625 bitcoins. We have no idea what the market value of a Bitcoin will be then. However, with a limited supply, I suspect that the block reward alone will be worth the while for miners anyway, especially since I am sure they will develop even more efficient ASICs in 9 years time.

You left out the "more  incentive for people to increase use" on chain.

Lets say 4 x X vs X, so thats 4 times as much at 1/2 say half the amount, would I believe give double the rewards.

With larger blocks there is no incentive for people to increase their fee to get confirmed faster since there is ample space in each block. Also, you are making the assumption that bigger blocks are going to increase the number of transactions by an equal amount. Chances are good that the amount of fee a miner could get from a 512 mega WU block will be lower than what they would get with a 4 mega WU block.

How will Re-orgs be stopped by financial incentive when the on-chain blocksize is to small even when full and your only geting 1 or say 1/4 of a btc per block rewards?

Without onchain blocksize increase the network becomes more vulnerable to re - orgs by financial insentive.

Eg

hack of $300M or some such large number.

miners only getting 0.25 btc a block and fees which will be limited in number by blocksize

So if you get
[1] a "HACK"
[2] BTC price drops a lot
[3] Block reward is very low

then you have removed large barrier's to an actors ability to bribe miners to re-org and thus destroy credibility of the BTC network.


Does this not force you to have larger blocks to get enough fees to defend this case?