Topic: CoinWallet says Bitcoin stress test in September will create 30-day backlog - page 5. (Read 6444 times)

Already did.  It makes me sad, but yes, I'm out of the market. 

fork off cryddit.

go cry over at reddit

Nope.  Got altcoin code ready to go, but then had a good long look at the market and use cases, and it's a fucking cesspool out there.  There's essentially no way to launch an alt without being used for some scam by somebody.  So I didn't.

Also, I don't really give much of a crap about XT vs. not XT at this point; when I did the math behind these "stress tests" and realized that someone is making a profit and so these stress tests will never ever stop, and saw that the community is effectively paralyzed on making the decision that is necessary to stop it, I gave up on you guys and sold all my bitcoins.  Hey, I made my 1500%.  Why get greedy? 

I don't have anything against the bitcoin community.  I just have no confidence at this point that you'll do what you need to do in time.   The issue is technical. All the responses to it are social and therefore meaningless.  There is too much arguing and denial and accusations and recriminations and FUD and calling each other FUDsters and so on, and not enough decisive action.   You don't have to hate New Orleans to see that they're not doing what they need to do about flood preparation, right?  And if people in New Orleans hate you for thinking they're not doing enough about flood preparation, that has absolutely no effect on  whether it's true or not. 

So, I no longer have a horse in the race.  Nobody's paying me, I'm not holding out for a price rise or fall, I don't have an alt in the market, nothing.  Sure, I'm disappointed.  I'd like to see Bitcoin succeed.  But when the block size decision got this political, it became very likely IMO that it won't.  The politics have become more important to the community than the underlying technical facts.

I'm still following along because I'm interested in it as a technology and as an example of how community dynamics and technology interact.  But in terms of input, all I'm doing is pointing out the facts.

The mathematical fact is that as long as the maximum block size is smaller than twice the number of "real" transactions that people will pay increased fees for, it costs less for a mining coalition to drive fees up by making bogus transactions, than the coalition can reap in increased fees.  (assuming the coalition is at least 38% of the mining power)  You don't have to take my word for it;  Do the math.

The "stress test" ceases to be profitable to a mining coalition if it costs them more to drive fees up than they get in increased fees.

Increasing the block size doesn't affect the opportunity to collect fees; it does however affect the amount of tx volume a coalition would have to pay fees for before it would have the effect of driving up costs for users and fee revenue for miners.

It increases the expense of the attack.

That implies you know that miners are responsible for the attack, which is not true. There exists no evidence that indicates the perpetrator of the spam attacks; none. Everything is speculation at this point.

I think this is a great point.  The cost to them is partially offset. 

Kind of sad that some segments of the bitcoin community would act so opportunistically against the group as a whole.  Normally, I am a fan of freedom and self interest but this seems counter productive in the long term as it reduces the attractiveness of using bitcoin and risks segmenting the community as we see with the XT-Core feud.

Do you also believe Gavin and Mike are lying or are you dishonestly opportunistic with your assessment?

Surprisingly another XT shill that resorts to evasiveness when confronted with factual statements.



So why don't you tell us all here, why you are pushing vehemently for a damaging hardfork to occur? What are your motives?

Edit: found his motive for XT shilling, he is an altcoin developer. How surprising!

Down with stress tests spam attacks! 

It's all code and discussions about the code at this point, but here's what I saw: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/6557

Check out the pull request referenced in the first post, I think that's the original design that gained acceptance.

Oh ok, I didn't know that! Can I get a link to learn more about it.
Thanks!

Wrong. Core team have been working on a solution/mitigator to these attacks for several weeks already. It will make it into version 0.11.1 or 0.12, depending on how Wladimir decides to do it.  

Well that's why we need bigger blocks. I bet that stress tests that were going on lately have been and the future ones as well are here only to show us that the bigger blocks are the necessity.

The thing is also that we can't prevent these stress tests. People can be doing them as much as they want, all they need is some cash. And whole Bitcoin ecosystem is suffering during these stress tests.

it is to push to block increase agenda.

No, that's incorrect.

XT miners have the same opportunities to collect fees as 1 MB miners, given a transaction rate that fills an equivalent proportion of a given block size. Is that not what this debate is about, increasing the carrying capacity?

You cannot make both arguments simultaneously; that tx rates will remain at present day levels post-fork and the miners will lose profitability, and yet also that transaction rates are set to soar which you suggest is not motivating miners at all? Are you making an honest argument Ray Dillinger, or did you just overlook that particular glaring contradiction?

Ding!  It's all about the profit motive.  Regardless of whether the miners claim tobe Pro-XT or Pro-Core, some coalition of them is making money by doing these "stress tests" that won't work under XT. 

Bitcoin is quite popular and it may not change a lot for that.

Why would it be any more plausible that pro-Core miners are planning this than that pro-XT miners are? Both stand to gain equally from doing so, and both also stand to gain from firstly conducting the attack, then secondly blaming the other party to discredit them.

And you expect that they're being honest about why they're doing it.  I think that makes you what the cons used to call an "all-day sucker."

You are wrong. Unsurprisingly the Coinwallet spam is conducted by XT shills:

“We feel that our tests might prove to be the catalyst that propels the core devs and miners to implement the required hard fork that is desperately needed,” CoinWallet mentioned.

Link: http://www.newsbtc.com/2015/08/19/coinwallet-september-bitcoin-stress-test-could-create-backlog/


Just one of the ugly strategies involved in this coordinated attack against Bitcoin. I don't care about Blockstream either but we have to stop XT

This "stress test" is, IMO, probably being done by a coalition of mining pools.  It exists for the plain and simple purpose of increasing mining profits by forcing users to pay higher fees.

Assuming they are X% of the hashing power, they are getting X% of the fees they put into it back when they get blocks.  So the expense is less than it appears to be.  They make a profit to cover the (100 - X)% because they ALSO get X% of the increased fees that users are putting in to cut ahead of their spam flood.

If we assume that legitimate users will pay increased fees for half the block space, and that the coalition represents more than 38% of the mining power, then spamming the network to keep blocks half full of spam (leaving the other half available for increased fee prices) is more profitable to them than not doing so.  

In practice it's even more profitable than that (or becomes profitable even for a coalition smaller than 38%) because (a) users outbidding them for block space are setting their fees to a nontrivial amount *above* the fee level of the spam rather than just equal to it, and (b) lots of users leave their fee settings higher even when the spammers spend a few weeks not supporting the increased cost of the "stress test".

I'm betting the people doing it DON'T want a switch to Bitcoin-XT; with the larger block size of Bitcoin-XT, legitimate traffic willing to pay the premium to cut ahead of the spam would be less than 1/2 the maximum block size and it wouldn't be profitable any more.