Topic: Epic, monstrous post of Jihan Wu (AntPool) - page 3. (Read 4816 times)

Both charts are misleading at best. Even if you consider nodes that haven't updated to 0.12.0 yet as in "don't care", the vote stands at almost 45-55 (I didn't run the numbers; it is an estimation after looking at the image below).
Correct. More than half their nodes are on Amazon apparently.

Well, considering that they're the ones that were most likely behind the recent attack, I don't think that they're going to give up just yet. Even if Core agreed to 2 MB block size limit, we would hear the same story some time after its activation asking e.g. for 3-4 MB block size limit (maybe it would be "Bitcoin Reloaded"?).

Of course any small group of people do not represent the consensus, that's why we need a large scale vote and count everyone's opinion through miners vote with their hash power, and service providers asking their customers (you can not fake hash power, and you can not fake long term users on platforms)

Currently for those who voted with their hash power, classic has the majority hash power, and even user number is several times more than core users. And for those who don't vote (currently over 90% of mining hash power has not voted yet) it means they don't care, we can assume that they want bitcoin to run on its historical trajectory (non-full blocks and low fee), so they can also be assumed to support classic. Or, we can assume that they don't command enough knowledge to do the vote, so their vote can not be counted. But since in bitcoin's world no one is responsible for your financial loss, I think everyone who is enough serious about his investment should participate in the vote

You are contradicting yourself.  Bitcoin is built on consensus.  If a group controlling 75% of hashpower, i.e. four miners, break lose and force a consensus change to Bitcoin, then it shows Bitcoin is under control by a very small group.  Both user support, and the need for a fork, can be faked like Coinbase does.

If Bitcoin has to be scaled via hard forks pushed by a small group, or if a small group (i.e. 2 miners) can block scaling by blocking a size change, then Bitcoin has to fall under control of a very few number of players to succeed.  This contradicts your previous stance.

Bitcoin programmers don't have powers.  They can not change the consensus rules without making an altcoin.  This is the primary security mechanism in Bitcoin.  If this wasn't true, Bitcoin would be just as worthless as fiat in a bank on Cyprus.  Just see how the Coinbasecoin known as "Classic" works out.  They have almost no user support, except for sockpuppets on Reddit, and even fakes node support through an attack on the bitcoin P2P insfrastructure, and try to provoke user support by spamming the blockchain with unnecessary transactions.  (The Amazon nodes are an attack due to the built-in sybil-resistance in Bitcoin nodes.  Home nodes will create a connection to at most one of those nodes, since it avoids connecting to more than one node per netblock.  The attack nodes will however make 8 outbound connections to people's home nodes, download blocks and transactions, and use a disproportionate amount of their bandwidth.  I had to throttle my outgoing bandwidth to the attack nodes ("Classic" nodes on Amazon servers) because they were consuming all my outgoing bandwidth, and hitting my incoming transactions limit.  To help the network, nodes must be spread out to all corners of the internet.)

There are plenty of altcoins out there, and very easy to vote by your feet now.  Even Coinbase could be honest about it, and fork off their own Coinbasecoin, or "Classic" as they call it, today.  Yet, I can't see Coinbase following that path.  They want to destroy Bitcoin instead, by showing that a small group of people can take control over it.

A hard fork is totally harmless if there is no major merchant and user support, someone in china is talking about making a hard fork first to prove that it is harmless

Only a 50-50 divide between users and miners and merchants will be a disaster, and that's why you need at least 75% hash power and major user support

And by not making a hard fork to raise the block size limit (which majority of people want), you also risk heavily affecting fundamentals: 1. people will realize that bitcoin is not capable of doing lots of transactions without third party solutions 2. people will realize that bitcoin programmers can be controlled by enterprises and totally changed to something else. As a result they vote with their feet, and without new buyers every day to absorb those 5000 coins sell pressure, exchange rate will only go down long term wise

This is correct, and for that reason Bitcoin should avoid a hard fork at all cost.  Most users and miners know it.  If the hard consensus rules in Bitcoin change, a hostile takeover by a single entity or group of powerful players already happened.

Imagine how foolish these guys will look, after screaming " Increase the Block size now, the sky is falling!!! " and then the new increased Blocks after SegWit will only be 40% full.   I think I will be one of the first people who will be screaming, " I told you so "
I guess a lot of them will be be running anonymous stress test for a while after the upgrade, to prevent people like myself of showing them up as fools and panic nanny's. That is until their money runs out, because a stress test after the block size increase are going to cost them a little more than what it is costing them now. ^smile^

I wasn't talking about financial decisions.

It did and that is a good thing because it happened on the testnet (it seems to have been caused due to some users running an older version, so you can disregard this already). If anything, there is much more support for Segwit than for a 'fork'. If everyone starts using it we are looking at about 180-190% transaction capacity (I forgot the exact number).

You're talking about consensus breaking implementations (i.e. altcoins); they have their own section.

The price bubble of course is pushed up by whales, most notably from China (Their whales has pushed up the price of everything that is scarce by at least 100x , from some special kind of wood to some special kind of dog)

But without a healthy fundamental, they can't cash out after the rally, and they risk of helping early adopters to cash out during the rally, so when facing uncertainty, they will stay out until dust is settled. From long term view, the bitcoin will not succeed if it can't prove itself as not controlled by any single entity or a group of powerful players

The minority chain will be attacked anytime by major hash power and all the transactions on it will be cancelled after being confirmed, no one will risk real money on that, the amount of cash flow on the minority chain will be minimal

Them asking to immediately increase the blocksize is completely hypocrytical for a mining pool that mines empty blocks frequently.

It is not like they have no influence over what is happening, and one thing they can do is to start include transactions again in all their mined blocks.

Their hypocracy aside, I tend to agree with their points.

In my experience the relationship is opposite.  Back in 2011 the price rised quickly, and people bought large farms of graphics cards to mine coins.  When the price fell back, and FPGAs came to market, people sold their GPUs to gamers.  The hashrate even went down a while after the 32 USD price peak, since the GPUs weren't profitable any more.  If you compare price and hashrate graphs, it is very clear that hashrate lagged the price.

If a lot of hashrate forks out, other people will come in and replace it.  The cost per hashrate hasn't changed.

Didn't SegWit just fork on the testnet? Is there even enough support for SegWit for it to get implemented now that much of the chinese have for all intensive purposes withdrawn from the "consensus document"? If you assume that SegWit does get implemented, and that everyone starts using it (unlikely), what growth rate are you assuming will take place in order to make this statement? 

I disagree.
Except when it comes to discussing something that, if implemented would be harmful to blockstream.

It is my understanding that the transactions that coinbase broadcast are a very small percentage of the network. Additionally batching withdrawals like this is severely detrimental to user privacy.

Additionally, I think your proposal is akin to saying that Bitcoin can be scaled if people just make less transactions

Any user and any merchant can conduct a transaction, but as far as accepting the transaction and broadcasting the next block: only the miner can do that. The only controversy is if there are various groups of miners with difference versions/consensus on the protocol. If a substantial majority of miner have agreed on a version, that is the version. No amount of lobbying by developers changes that.

Correct. And if you boil it down, what he is really saying is that the miners should have the power to determine what changes to make to the protocol and when to make them. He talks about "the users", but the users have no control over anything.

Actually the better part is that if the big miners like AntPool start accepting Classic blocks for now then I find no reason for everyone to accept the hard fork rather than going into a deeper controversy.

Well, this will very much happen after the next block halving when there will be a scarcity of miners due to lack of interest in mining.

Thought experiment.  Miners with the major hash power (over 51%, let us even say 75%) have consensus on one fork with 2MB blocks with some arbitrary low fee, however, users and merchants only accept transactions using the other fork, with 1MB blocks and a high enough fee to change the profitability of the mining. Wouldn't this result in the users and merchants in the 25% fork to force the miners in the 75% fork to change, since the miner's clients will demand the higher block rewards?

In my understanding and also history records, scientists and programmers are very bad at making economics and financial decisions, because they lack of the overview of how human and society works and they all focus on small details while ignoring the most important things

There is no lack of examples: Isaac Newton went flat broke chasing a stock bubble, and a group of Nobel price winners made a hedge fund LTCM, using sophisticated mathematical model to forecast the market, its collapse almost dragged US into recession

Currency's value is all about trust and stability, and so far many things core devs do (like segwit and artificially limiting capacity) are making bitcoin worse in these two aspects. I usually see this kind of stupidity from many developers so I'm not surprised. Maybe in 10 years they will learn

Without hash power (the cost of mining) any coin's price that merchants and users use will drop like a waterfall until it reaches the production cost, it is called arbitraging: You can always borrow coin and sell and mine it back if the exchange rate is much higher than production cost

This will make sure that any attempt to move away from the major hash power will cause the biggest financial loss. And that's the reason Satoshi said the major CPU vote is the only consensus

The Chines government could easy take over the mining pools inside China and force them to mine empty blocks, they could also force this Jihan Wu to release long winded statements to help direct Bitcoin development in a direction of their choosing. *adjusts tin foil hat* Jihan Wu is ripe for manipulation. If he has not already been turned into a puppet he will be.

Thank you sturle. I am just studying and learning about the ecosystem. But mining pools themselves act as users and merchants in terms of creating a very large number of transactions themselves (between the pool and their clients as they claim their share of rewards). I think you are right though, that even if they spam the system with micro transactions, it would be tough to generate a 51% attack.