Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 159. (Read 2032248 times)

What is the context? Just their old comments critical of it, or something new?

I like your approach to clearly define terms but i don't like your approach of effectively redefining decentralized as a binary term when it has been generally understood to be fuzzy. This sort of redefining of terms can easily lead to confusion or deliberate obfuscation.

For example, by your definition, there being a miner or pool with 50%-1GH of the hash rate would still be considered a decentralized system, but in practice such a miner could trivially increase his hash rate or collude with any other miner and then costlessly double spend or block. Likewise, a 50%+1GH pool that attempts to block might find that some miners leave and the ability to block is lost. By your definition this would not be decentralized but in practice it would be since ability is so fragile.

i prefer to view decentralization more along the lines of a continuous metric such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapley%2dShubik_power_index

The entities with the highest scores not only indicate whether the system is decentralized (your usage) if <1 but also how decentralized (common usage). The approach is not perfect here since there are different kinds of votes. Pool operators control important infrastructure and have some influence but their votes are not measured directly in hash rate.

Further, one can likely construct a single metric along the lines of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herfindahl_index (but not exactly that) which would characterize the presence of entities with relatively high Shapley-Shubik scores.

hahaha.  last time i posted in the Spinoff thread was July 25, 2014.  

yeah!  i'm really pushing it, ain't i Greg!

i think it's hilarious that /u/nullc has tried to stir up this conspiracy around several of the members in this thread in regards to Spinoffs.

i haven't clicked on that thread in what must be over a year now, yet we got Blockstream supporters tallying up #'s of posts as some sort of evidence.  i think i'll go over there after this just to find out the last time i posted just so i can embarrass them a little more the next time they bring it up.  the first time was /u/nullc when he stopped by here a month or so ago.  i had no idea what he was gabbing about at the time.  i've kinda lost interest in the concept altho i think Peter R had a good concept at the time.  the Blockstream crowd seems to think we're gonna release a spinoff if they get their SC's or LN network up or something.  TBH, i don't even understand the FUD and am not even going to bother trying to.  they're just immature and must be pulling their hair out over there.

Nope.  Satoshi is a libertarian and believes in spontaneous order, not central planning.

I think plenty of people have been doing so. The problem is since their is no "Bitcoin organization" none these accurate voices are speaking from any position of authority and instead just get drowned out. And if you view the core devs as the closest thing to a Bitcoin organization, then the fact that some of them are the ones spreading FUD makes it twice as hard.

It is very admirable that Satoshi stepped back after Bitcoin got going (and has yet to cash out his coins). However I think it would have been much better if as he was leaving he wrote and communicated what he thought the long term direction should be along a variety of aspects. For example from his writing I think he took it for granted that he thought the 1MB should be raised over time and that bitcoin should be structured so that most people could work directly with the MC. A simple 5 pages could have communicated a lot. None of it would be binding and he would have stated that this is what he wanted but people now decide. But by doing this it would later be easier for people to refer back to the original vision in a clear manner.

The problem is Satoshi left without explicitly clear long term direction. The result has been schism over how Bitcoin should evolve. Personally I am fine with that because it makes it harder for change Bitcoin at all, but the problem is there were a few basic changes that were needed to achieve his vision that now are hard to do.

I'm enjoying the epic Yoda-vs-Vader drama between Gavin the G-Man and Dr. Backamoto.

On Sunday, Adam reminded everyone why he is basically Bitcoin's CTO.  The best bit:


LOL..SO R3KT   

Clearly Satoshi's "eventually" deadline for scaling BTC to Visa+Gold+Fiat+StarbucksGiftCard+BusToken levels comes some time after implementing duplex micropayment channels.

here's just to show that as far as my position goes, it has never been just about bigger blocks or Gavin/Mike vs gmax/Adam.  it's always been primarily about financial conflict of interest from within core dev and the concept behind SC's:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/23fr63/bitcoin_20_unleash_the_sidechains/cgwt2nz

Big dump going on in $DJT right now:

I'm actually fairly annoyed that I have to be the one to create and publish a realistic and accurate Bitcoin threat model, because trying to create a privacy threat model is enough work on its own, and there are plenty of #bitcoin-wizards who could do as well or a better of a job.

Plenty of people have the ability put out accurate and objective information that could clear away the FUD and let us have a rational debate, but nobody else is apparently willing to do so.

+1.  Justus, I've been reading some of your work and I really like your push to clearly and precisely define the cryptocurrency terms we're using.  Here's what I had jotted down yesterday, which sort of jives with the two points you made above:

   Bitcoin is decentralized if no entity exists with the ability to costlessly double-spend or bar valid transactions from the blockchain.

Thoughts?

Exactly, great way to put it.

This is what is being missed in the centralization fear mongering. Because of the way Bitcoin is structured even with further centralization it is still relatively easy for SPV light wallets to verify for themselves the validity of a payment to an address they control. The two ways to attack this are either 1) block re-orgs which require 51% style attacks or 2) creating false header chains (hard) plus making sure the SPV wallet can not connect to a single honest node (very hard).

Centralization also does not make denial of service attacks more likely. Even with more pool centralization SPV light nodes can connect to honest miners to include transactions in their blocks.

The 1MB limit will become in itself become a denial of service attack, so far it is the only real threat right now.

I used to, but his tone has changed over the last 4 years. I'm not even convinced it's the same person on the other end. Certainly a lot more bitter and hostile.

for anyone with any respect left for marcus_of_augustus, take a look at this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3bpbqv/woohoo_check_out_the_size_of_block_363270/csofmu6

[–]marcus_of_augustus 2 points 7 hours ago
 
Do they still give gold stars for 5 year olds?
You should be very careful with all those cold wallets, things could go very badly if family and friends are centralising trust in one questionable opsec practise.

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You're probably right on that one.

Let's try this one: non economic actor decided to spam persistently at little cost to them as blocks get close to being filled by real activity, say starting like where we are right now, at the 50-60% level. Fees for regular users skyrocket making use untenable.

Agreed.  We'll know when it's "eventually" when we see it.

That would hamper business greatly.  Almost everything I did, for instance, was over ssh/ssl.  It would take years and billions of dollars to re-write the work of countless engineers who've done likewise.

The next hand which would be played would be to mandate the use of core ssl which had a (known) backdoor.  I could not honestly say that I would have difficulty compliling it in and thus not needing to re-write my tools however.

The hand past that would be trying to find a safe home for the core network and stego.  One of Adam Back's memorable quotes here on this thread IIRC went something like "at the margins steganography wins."  The trouble is that if Bitcoin has moved beyond what is possible to do at these margins, we lose.

From the perspective of a Bitcoin user, every possible thing that can go wrong with Bitcoin can be categorized into one of two failure modes:

• A payment you belive to be valid, isn't (double spend)
• You are unable to perform a payment that you want to perform (denial of service)

All a user cares about how certain they can be that their balance is valid, and that they are able to spend their coins.

Before we can talk intelligently about how an attacker might reduce the number of miners and/or the number of nodes, we first need to establish why the attacker would do this, i.e. the ways in which an attacker can benefit from performing double spending or denial of service attacks.

Take selfish mining as an example. This is not an attack that directly affects Bitcoin users.

It may be possible for an attacker to solve more blocks than their share of the hashing power would initially suggest, but that in and of itself doesn't make your balance invalid or prevent you from spending your coins. It only affects Bitcoin users indirectly, to the extent that double spending or DoS attacks are easier if the attacker successfully reduces its competition.

1) Attacker: Miners
The key question here is do larger blocks even change the mining ecosystem, because if larger blocks do not effect miners then the point is moot since the attacks are the same with or without larger blocks.
There are good reasons to believe that larger blocks do not effect mining. Miners already have centralized on pools, which themselves are large enough to scale up resources. Pools do not have to be physically close to miners and can (and should) migrate to well networked regions and cloud services.
Miners themselves already use the stratum protocol that require < 1kbps connectivity, they are not impacted by or see any effects from larger blocks. The pool handles the block, while the miner just processes a data packet that is the same size regardless of blocksize.

2) Attacker: Nodes
As you point out, all you require is a connection to one honest node and that honest node can expose any attack. If 50% of the P2P nodes are coordinating an attack and a SPV wallet connects to 8 random nodes, then the probability of success is 1/2^8 or 0.39%. This attack is very difficult with a larger number of nodes.
In the case where P2P nodes become highly centralized (let's say they are reduced to 25 very large entities), then it is likely that several of those nodes would be trusted volunteer efforts (think an EFF node) or run by trusted entities (think a shared ivy league university node) and SPV wallets would be programmed to require connections to a least a few trusted nodes. This is probably an even more difficult attack than today where we have 6K nodes, since it is relatively easy to spin up 6K nodes in AWS for the short period of time needed.

Huh?  No it's not.  Humans don't enter into the picture at all except that they are prone to generate things in the normal course of a days events which can be used as carriers (e.g., cat pics.)

Packet engines (inspection, capture, etc) would never be trying to deduce steganographic content from a channel.  For the foreseeable future (due to the arms race nature of things) the best they could do would be to fork of likely carriers to other analysis infrastructure.