Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 132. (Read 2032248 times)

That's a fair comment and I think I see your point.  Smooth made a similar comment perhaps a week ago now when I was trying to argue that "centralized" and "decentralized" were absolute adjectives.

I guess I'm just trying to find a way to "break down" the problem into pieces, hoping that it will help us to see things more clearly.  That's why I'm looking at it as two pieces (A) Is the network preventing double spends and is the network censorship resistant? (B) What are the chances of it staying that way?

One need not be excessively paranoid to suspect that censorship will closely match what governments wish it to when a system is completely under the wing of a handful of huge corporations which operate completely at the pleasure of the government (which they, at best, play some role in molding.)  As Peter Todd mentions in his conversations with these people, it is perfectly obvious to this group that censorship is a no-brainer and the only logical way the system can work.

Similarly, one need be more of a historian than a paranoid freak to suspect that governments will formulate policies which protect systems which empower them and their sponsors.  I will not be using Bitcoin if/when it relies on the kindness of governments for it's function and thus their protection will not be of benefit to me.

To me, 'the architecture of the network' not only matters but it is the most critical aspect of Bitcoin and the aspect which will define whether it has a chance of keeping the two promises you mention or not.

As an exercise for the interested reader, one might consider Mike Hearn's statement that 'there is no difference between confiscating someones money and keeping them from spending it for 20 years' via mining consolidation and censorship with his statement about a small integer number of copies of the blockchain worldwide supporting a perfectly workable system.  It ought to be abundantly clear where HE is wishing to go with this thing, and one might consider this before dedicating ones efforts toward projects aimed at bloating the system as quickly as possible and at all costs (very much including power-grab 'benevolent dictator' style forks and internecine warfare which is almost certain to collapse the ecosystem of it's initial form.)

There are many shades of grey in Bitcoin as it has no fungibility and can't really protect transactions against miners censoring it.

Frankly, I think the only thing it demonstrates is your paranoia.  What matters is whether the Bitcoin network functions according to its promises of (1) double-spend protection and (2) censorship resistance.  The architecture of the network doesn't matter so long as those two promises are kept.  

You could argue that with only four to six copies of the Blockchain worldwide, that there is a greater chance that these promises will be broken (and I would tend to agree), but I see that as a different debate.    

He's 100% right about that.  Bitcoin could probably survive with a single blockchain much like the federal reserve maintains one source of truth.

The statement is enlightening because it demonstrates the stark differences of Bitcoin in our world that different people have.  Like you and I for instance from everything I can see.

If one sees tainting as a good an necessary thing, and understands the communications optimizations which are possible between large and well funded business entities, then a small integer number of existing blockchains makes all the sense in the world.

1. Does the network still provide strong double-spend protection?

2. Can users freely^* publish valid transactions to the Blockchain (censorship resistance)?

^*That is, subject only to marginal transaction fees.

Is he right or wrong about that?

Via what methodology would we test that hypothesis before arriving at a conclusion about its validity?

That's a good thing, because it ensures the economic crisis is over and Chinese companies will have plenty of capital to fund an explosion of bandwidth to homes.

Meanwhile, back in the real world...

China threatening short sellers.  Shades of US back in 2008.  the volatility back then makes Bitcoin look like cake:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-07-09/china-soars-most-2009-after-government-threatens-sellers-arrest-global-stocks-surge

There is quite the rumpus over on reddit over the blocksize debate. Reading this thread is a sea of calm reason in comparison.

Perhaps you could do a poll cypherdoc ..

EDIT: which is simply for / against blocksize scaling..

good question.  how do they distinguish? 

like i said above, w/o a block size cap, spam fees can actually pay to help grow the network and user base long term before it dies off. 

i hate to bring up an analogy from medicine since it may not be appropriate but i'll try nonetheless.

one of the greatest things i learned during my internship btwn med school and residency in eyes, is that too much intervention can cause problems for patients.  every 3 mo i'd rotate onto a new ward with responsibilities for about a couple of dozen gorked out patients.  i say gorked out b/c invariably all of them had at least a dozen meds onboard for a variety of reasons most of which had to do with sedation, pain, or anti-anxiety.  problem was, these meds unbeknownst to their previous physicians were preventing these ppl from getting better.  this was a repeating problem.  so the first thing i would do would be to cocentrate on stripping off as many of these unnecessary meds as possible.  much to everyone's amazement, these pts would perk up, turn around and start walking again, interacting with staff, feeling better, be more alert, and generally just get better to the pt i could discharge them.  and this experience happened over and over for me.  twas a great personal accomplishment for me and one i will never forget; don't over do it.

pt being, i still think the block size cap is the fundamental problem here.  more rules and limits that core dev piles on simply complicates the code and makes it more complex.  if anything, we should be stripping off rules and limits so that the free mkt can come to bear on many of these problems we are currently seeing.  the miners and users are perfectly capable of regulating the size of blocks and fees on their own.  if we lift the cap, the spam can actually help the network.  as long as spammers have to pay fees any spam attempts will line the pockets of miners and go back to growing the hashrate.  that would be a good thing and the last thing the spammers want to do.  no doubt they will try at first so we should expect even greater higher level attacks initially but in the long run, they will die off.  that's b/c their real objective is to disrupt new user growth which w/o a cap will be short circuited.  any further spam then will just help the tx mkt to grow, miners to profit, and yes, full nodes will eventually develop their own fee mkt too.  yes, full node capacities will have to grow but that should be viewed as a good thing b/c on the other end that will mean that miners are prospering (which is ok Greg) and user growth will be skyrocketing along with the price.  more merchants will come on board with new user growth and they will want and probably have a fiduciary responsibility to run their own full nodes which will add to network capacity.

so strip off rules and limits within reason, not add, and let BitcoinRun!

In the short run, miners will keep putting up with spam transactions because most of their revenue (great majority) is coming from the BTC block reward. As rewards become less and less and transaction volume (spam or legitimate) continues to increase the balance will gradually start to change.

Eventually miners will start to ignore transactions without some minimum transaction fee (which will change over time based on block reward/transaction fee balance).

This is a self correcting problem which miners will correct on their own (by only verifying transactions with some minimum fee)

We all expected this from the beginning. The blockchain will eventually be supported by transactions fees as block reward keeps dropping. The only thing that has changed is that miners may respond sooner because of all these spam transactions. Spam will stop once the miners raise the minimum fee enough (or spam transactions will continue but never be confirmed)

Hi! Yeah, I was always somewhat put off by the presentation here, too confusing, threads with too many pages. Have a couple of old accounts that I lost all login data for. On the other hand, Reddit is sometimes a bit shallow and fast scrolling...

So they did increase the fees then and not reduce their blocksize, it seems? That would make a lot more sense to me (from the miner's perspective).

Nah, there were also 364354, 364383, 364393 and 364398

Goddammit, Peter Todd hits the nail on the head! Kudos to him.
Yes, that 10x reduction looks to be unwise in hindsight. I recall the painful and protracted debate on bct just getting the dust threshold at 5460 sats in the first place.


Hey, nice to see you in this thread.
It appeared that BitFury was aggressively filtering by fee when producing small 138KB blocks, however they have just mined a 998KB block (364549) which I think is their first near this size.

Jeff Garzik has just posted 2 pull requests for bitcoin core on github:

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/6405
Remove TX priority and free transaction area from mempool, block creator.

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/6402
Floating network relay fee increase, if memory pool grows too large.

the latter will introduce, if merged, "a relay fee that adjusts to floods
which cause the memory pool to grow too large".

It seems that core devs start becoming aware of the lack of
of economic incentives for services provided by full nodes.

So miners are filtering out the spam? What are they filtering for?

Unfortunately, the majority in the blocks I checked earlier today have been the DOS attack-- e.g. transactions tracable from outputs of this transaction https://blockchain.info/tx/3bad15167c60de483cd32cb990d1e46f0a0d8ab380e3fc1cace01afc9c1bb5af  and a few others. ... though the attack style has been shifting to evade filtering by miners.

The change mentioned in the chat above is https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/3305 (you might find the comments there interesting), it's one of Mikes couple contributions to Bitcoin Core.