Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 149. (Read 2032270 times)

you missed the most important alternative of all. 

miners will pare down block sizes for maximum verification times and propagation times.

ok, i couldn't but help notice the contradiction:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3c579i/yesterdays_fork_suggests_we_dont_need_a_blocksize/cssz5ea

awaiting a response.

The #bitcoin-wizards have fallen into that trap before, when the btcd team announced the results of their benchmarking on large simnet blocks.

Their complete system measurements were quite a bit slower than what the individual component microbenchmarks suggested.

If you look at the comments made regarding their blog post, you'll see the same dynamic playing out as is here.

Thanks for pointing out the difference between the black-box approach and "looking inside the box."  I think the black box approach is useful because it forces us to consider the actual behaviour of the complete system, and then ask if our understanding of the inner pieces make sense given our observations. 

The other thing is that in my model, τ, is more properly the time delay between when the miner has enough information to begin mining on the previous blockheader, and when he has fully verified the previous block, created a new non-empty block to mine on, and sent the block template for that non-empty block to his hash power to begin working on it.  Gmax was only considering one component of this time delay.  

right back at it:

What are +EV projects? What is Newcoin?

( seeing as I was poking the bear anyway: Bitcoin Block sizes and # of transactions by pool attr [imgur.com album] )

Gmaxes argument lives and dies on his assertion of 80ms block validation times.  We now have to go off and independently verify this.  Then we have to figure out the discrepancy between this number and the painfully slow sync times and 100% cpu use during sync.  This work may discover inefficiencies and result in optimizations that have nothing to do with the holy war going on.  Peter is looking at the system as a black box and analyzing its emergent properties.  Gmax is looking inside the box.  We need to resolve the contradiction.

Regardless gmaxes argument was not a barbecue -- that would have happened if the math was flawed for example.  In fact gmax's "argument" is just another guy making an unsubstantiated (but likely true) contrary claim.  You know this because what if you run core and post "that's funny I am seeing 5 sec times"? What happens is gmaxes entire argument fails.

    Its sad that you can't tell the difference between an argument and an unsubstantiated claim.

I think this was a shot at Gavin

Now I understand your username. The heat of the venom. I suppose if one can't take heat, get out of the kitchen?

Siskel had godawful shitty taste in Hollywood palaver and thus couldn't be expected to do any better himself.

OTOH, Charlie Brooker is a fantastically vicious UK media critic and social commenter.  He also makes superlative TV, like Dead Set and Black Mirror.

The 'conflict-of-interest' canard is an excuse by and for those who can't but presume to opine on whose who can.

I noted that accomplishment recently in the Monero thread:


Be prepared for a black swan event though.

By everyone, I could mean a much wider scope than even Bitcoin's community now.

My point about wanting to differentiate as MJ did and not be Lebron is apropos. I still remember MJ's sophomore 63 points against Larry Bird and the Celtics. And his transformation to a team winner of 6 championships, with a ragtag group.

I aim big and fail often. Sometimes (3 times so far) I succeeded. You guys pursued the safe and timid route. And well describes the difference in our demeanor too smooth. I am a much more flamboyant risk taker. You are the quintessential diversified, steady handed capitalist. I have the traits of an artist, you the traits of an actuarial (well at least in terms of your investments, I don't know about your other hobbies). I respect your logic skills and often your level-headed judgement. But we can't tame an artist. They have an innate, incessant drive to create.

Oh boo hoo, poor Peter got mildly but most-deservedly flamed for spouting pseudo-scientific nonsense on stilts.  He'll be in therapy for years!  

Gmax is just understandably impatient with his job being made harder by the Gavinistas' endless defamation, exaggerations, BS, and agitprop:


Gmax is not a punching bag; he's allowed to hit back when people accuse him of obstructionism for personal profit.  The Gavinista whining about 'ad hom' in that context is spectacularly hypocritical.  "I'll post the napkin pic illustrating Evil Blockstream's Snidely Whiplash scheme, then tsk-tsk Gmax for reacting with anything more than cool professional detachment...that'll show everyone what Awful People the core devs are!"

But nevermind that, let's all weep for poor barbequed Peter.  I'll send him some aloe vera lotion, care of the burn ward.  

Oh my pink face  . I just stumbled across what I wrote on June 30, 2011...I was obviously distracted, not focused, and naive about cryptography, just picked up some random forum post I landed on via Google. Actually I was correct, except my pessimism about the possibility for anonymity as a solution.

Yes, that's what happens when you build something and try to launch it with a fraudulent 82% premine, a fake backstory, and an army of shills trying to make it appear popular and established. A clusterfuck. So that is (or more accurately was) a fair characterization, but not one of any of our making, and one that Monero has attempted (with a fair degree of success) to replace with a vibrant and successful community.

I disagree with your last sentence though. Monero is indeed the first legitimate cryptonote coin, which was launched as a minimal fork for the sole reason of getting rid of the fraudulent premine. (Also worth noting that the public face of the cryptonote team welcomed and invited forks, and even released a "coin fork creation kit"; https://cryptonotestarter.org)

Monero has always been a fully public open source project where everyone including the original developers has been (and continue to be) welcome to contribute. For all we know, some of the original developers (who are anonymous, as are many Monero contributing developers) have contributed. We know, for example, that during the chain fork attack last year, the cryptonote group sent a fix (though the community had already by that time developed one anyway).


You can't necessarily ever get everyone working together. Nevertheless a great many people are indeed working together a year later, and that should say something about the leadership. When you count the core developers, contributing developers to the core project, people working on Monaro-related businesses such as MyMonero and Crypto-Kingdom, mining pools, various independent developers and other significant projects (such as the new Android mobile wallet) there are at least several dozen actual developers working on various aspects of it, along with many non-developers contributing in their own ways too.

I will leave to others whether that constitutes good leadership, but my opinion should be fairly obvious.

Yes, though I'd have to wonder what's special about the last 3 weeks?  BTC China and Antpool increased their max block size a bit before that.  Could also use a different metric for 'full' - e.g. "N% of their apparent maximum".
( Some of the discussion since your post may have made this moot - let me know, I can whip something up regardless )

This was also implicit in my upthread point that the only justification for widespread 0 txn blocks would be bandwidth (propagation) delay.

IBLT purports to improve that by sending less impulse data when announcing the block, but it can't help if the steady state average rate of txns is greater than the bandwidth of the node and it can't stop the collusion of withholding transactions and flooding to force lower bandwidth nodes to be essentially SPV miners. That is why I say it is obfuscation of centralization.

A: perhaps death and taxes. 

You're assuming they are perfectly rational, and have remained perfectly rational during the measurement period for the ratio. If they were perfectly rational, they wouldn't have had orphans recently, because they would have anticipated the upgrade. The ratio tells you about their past strategies, which they might have tried and abandoned (or will abandon). If they were perfectly rational, there is no reason for the 16/35=45% difference in processing times (based on ratio), I would have thought that F2Pool has slower connectivity, so should be the other way around. If miners were perfectly rational, they would pay attention, in the same way, to the way empty blocks worry users. Data has much variation, and our estimates, by completely different methods, are actually surprisingly close (~10 sec handwaving, ~16 sec empirical), not necessarily contradictory.

That is another potentially valid perspective. I guess I was just a bit turned off at the community's treatment of BoolBerry (even allegations that he was one of the original Bytecoin devs and that should imply distrust). It wasn't like you guys created CN and he was copying your whitepaper. I do however balance that with someone in his community trying to talk up BoolBerry's features as somehow radically superior to Monero's.

Again I think the heart of it for me personally is that felt Monero doesn't really own anything, other than its own (perhaps smaller than Bitcoin's rather small) community and its refined implementation. In the sense that Python owns its syntax. If you create a JPython you are still helping Python. If you create a BitcoinJ, you are still helping Bitcoin. This is what I meant when I wrote the ecosystem was a "clusterfuck" (or let's say non-ideal). We had developers and communities fighting each other on the same protocol. It felt like copycoins vs. Bitcoin, except in this case none of them were the first and legitimate one.

One of the signs of leadership is being able to get everyone working together.

I would have wanted to differentiate from CN and Bytecoin rather than claim ownership of the mess. Any way, I have the benefit of non-involvement and hindsight (heckling from the bleachers, not in the game, can't be tackled). I do understand you all are trying to bring an important technology to the market and make it stable.

Someone remarked why I didn't join a CN coin's effort. So I just wanted to make my personal reasons clear. It doesn't mean there is a problem with Monero now. It was just my reasons last year. And now it is too late for me to change my decision. Also I was more ill at that time, was still learning, and at the time I didn't think ring-sigs were the "end all and be all". Then by the time I started to think on chain anonymity is the holy grail (due to autonomy and end-to-end principle), I had pretty much backed off any efforts in this space late 2014. Recently epiphanies changed my outlook and my health also perhaps improved somewhat.