Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 221. (Read 2032248 times)

Oleganza arguing with me that Bitcoin has already achieved gold status and can do so w/o more scaling.  c'mon, i don't even argue that.  i say it is in the process of doing so:

https://twitter.com/oleganza/status/611298778667220992

Speaking of O(n²) scaling:



I took some creative liberties 

Some 'trained' doctor told my mom not very long ago that she should take some medication for cholesterol.  When she asked about the reports of liver damage, the guy said "Oh, we can do liver transplants now."

From my research into vaccines I am sure that 90% of 'trained' doctors have very little knowledge of how the various parts of our immune systems interact and how the ecology of diseases themselves actually work.  They are trained to 'know' what the pharmaceutical industry wants them to know and nothing more though some of them will, thankfully, not stop there.

So, no, I won't go to a quack.  I'll evaluate the situation myself and decide who is most appropriate to help me out then I'll evaluate what they tell me and double-check that it is not self-serving bullshit.  I am sure that almost no medical doctors are deliberately evil.  Just that they are humans like everyone else.  You probably have to be in the upper 10% in terms of native intelligence to obtain a doctorate (medical or otherwise) but that is certainly not sufficient to be immune against intellectual laziness and various socio-economic pressures.

From the recent language I've read from Wlad, this doesn't sound too likely.

They forget that people will remember this incident and that there will be pay back time when they want to change the protocol for their own reasons. Not too smart.

The is no mempool limit right?

Bad ass analysis:

https://tradeblock.com/blog/bitcoin-network-capacity-analysis-part-5-stress-test-analysis

That is why I think a permanent solution to the blocksize limit today is better than a limit increase that leaves the issue to be addressed later. Even with the 20MB change, we will have to implement another hard fork in 3-5 years. It is better to take care of the issue once and for all, and have future hard fork decisions be limited to a single proposed change.

The voting proposal is one form of a permanent solution, Gavin's doubling every 2 years is another, creating a floating limit that resets every x blocks to the average of recent blocks plus overhead is a third. Any of these three work fine and have their own pros and cons.

Gavin has been seriously distracted from this  , just as the SC guys have been seriously distracted from their own work, by their blowback on the 1MB.

Yeah, you may well be right about SC/LN timing, I am still trying to give them the benefit of the doubt, FWIW (at least until Wladimir breaks ranks).

Exactly, it is why the argument that a cartel might form to limit the blocksize and ignore the protocol limit, is unlikely to succeed.

BTW, does anyone know what the status of IBLT is? This one change (which doesn't require a fork) would do a lot for the network.

I think they want to make sure a hard fork is already needed around the same time they are ready to launch Blockstream's LN and SC changes. This would make it easier to push the changes through. i.e. "OK, transactions recently hit the 8MB limit and we need to increase the limit today, here are some additional updates to include in the fork".

If there is no pressing need for another hard fork (because the blocksize issue was already dealt with), then the entire discussion is focused on if people want to make a drastic change, and there is no rush to do so. Combining the two might accelerate the process.

For a VC backed firm, that has limited time to demonstrate adoption or revenue, running into a wall where it takes 2 years just to convince the Bitcoin ecosystem to change for you, can be a killer.

there is no reason to be part of the 51% cartel in this eg. one of the miners will stop cooperating because it leaves money on the table and whoever breaks rank can profit by pretending to support it and earn more fees by processing bigger blocks giving the 51% advantage to the network.

Gavin's solution is very good, and the 2-week grace period a smart move. The reason for this is that it gets the most people on-board with the >1MB change in a controlled manner. It is axiomatic that 100% of miners cannot be in the first 75% to upgrade even if they all wanted to. The 2-week period focuses minds on a known deadline and will likely see a "hockey-stick" uptick in the adoption curve. I would expect 85-90% mining power behind the change before the first >1MB block is mined. If 90% was the original target then Bitcoin's ecosystem growth, supported by the majority, could be stymied by a mere 11% of hold-out miners. The grace period also allows for non-mining nodes to upgrade who are not paying close attention to the whole process.

I like Jeff's BIP 100 with the miner voting, but not sure about the 90% he mentions because of the concern above.
Also, I really don't like a fixed date for everyone to upgrade (although this is far better than no change planned at all). Not using block versioning to change the 1MB means applying a sub-standard software solution for politically correct reasons, i.e. just so people can say "Aha, the users control Bitcoin and are telling the miners what to do." We already know the user consensus on a dozen btc and reddit polls, ecosystem business feedback, and now at least 50% of mining power opinion. So the change should be done as safely as possible. Gavin is perusing this path.

Probably the biggest reason that Core Dev is prepared to let the 1MB limit be constantly hit is that they think they can manage the situation. Perhaps they need to look up the word "hubris" in the dictionary.

A big bazooka in Core Dev's (fairly small) armory needed to "manage" a blocks-limit-full situation is prior roll-out of a change to purge unconfirmed tx from node mempools. This would in theory blunt some of the nasty effects in Mike's Crash Landing scenario.

So, no surprise that a pull request exists to do this:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/6281


(my emphasis)
Hmm, DoS issues like ordinary users legitimately trying to use Bitcoin after tx are backing up when free block-space has vanished?

However, what appears to be a bed of roses rapidly turns into a bed of thorns...


Their bazooka has a barrel bent into a U-shape.

Another big concern about mempool limiting is the implications for IBLT, which is Bitcoin's best hope for challenging the likes of Visa and MC in the medium, not long-term.
Randomly ejecting unconfirmed tx, or allowing a user-configurable max-mempool-size, creates non-uniform mempools. This seriously degrades the potential for IBLT, especially when miners want to clear most of the unconfirmed tx, to maximize revenue when the block reward is lower.

 I enjoyed your dialog so much

To me it is the same, and, correct me if I am wrong, this is according to protocol. I guess the nodes also have a saying, but who could oppose such a decision?

No, I think both of you conspiracy theorists are smarter than Chomsky. Chomsky is a slave of the establishment and both of you conspiracy theorists are free hero members of the society.
If you brake your leg or your neck, you should consult a quack instead of a university trained doctor of the establishment.

EDIT: I was a bit quick to respond. Yes, If the cartel can collude with the government, they are set for a real monopoly. It is not only the cost, but that they can keep internal and external attackers in check by the force of law, (less kindly expressed as violence in contempt of human  rights).


Cartels are unstable. There is a ton of literature on the subject.

Just think about the internal pressure. A subset of the members can collude to fool the othes. A subset can collude with someone external. If the cartel does something stupid, outside forces will be quick to attack. For instance, if the cartel reduces production to hike prices, they will be bled from externals that have the higher market price, but not the volume constraints. If a cartel divide markets, the attacker will have only one competitor. The list goes on.

For bitcoin mining, there sure is a cartel if there is an economic point to it (large equipment orders for instance). But a shadow cartel with a subgroup from the first cartel and some others could easily appear.

I'm not sure cartels is really the right analogy here.

A cartel in the traditional sense is a small number of large entities banding together to force everyone to follow their decisions.

But in Bitcoin, any miner not in the cartel could choose to issue larger blocks and capture the fees. That is how Bitcoin's open nature works. The only way a cartel could succeed here is if 51% of the hash rate pooled together and agreed to build a longest chain ignoring large blocks. But I would call this at 51% attack, not a cartel.

so then how do you deal with the IBLT issue given that we need a solution now?

That's only true in the sense that cartels are naturally unstable unless and until they get support from governments in the form of externalizing the cost of enforcement.