Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 311. (Read 2032266 times)

Almost certainly 'never' by any realistic definition of various things.

UTXO is the core of the information of who has what.  Coinage in circulation solves the problem in several ways, the most important being loss of information (which is why TPTB would like to and likely will at some point do away with it.)  Coinage is segmented into equal units which can scale due to the aformentioned loss of high resolution info.  UTXO is a minor optimization in the segmentation, but that optimization  vanishes with popularity.  Right now it is early and there are plenty of keys which control the equivalent of trillion-dollar bills.  That would vanish if the rather absurd dream of universal usage came into existence.  It would be relatively easy for Google-scale entities do the bookkeeping on individual satoshis in near real-time and relatively impossible for others to do so.

Solving 'the UTXO problem' would require what is by most definitions 'magic'.  Perhaps some future quantum-effect storage, communications, and processing schemes could 'solve' the problem but I'm not expecting to pick up such technology at Fry's by the next holiday season (Moore's law notwithstanding.)

Expanded that for you.

For details see: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/bitcoin-20mb-fork-941331 and the recent reddit threads where Gavin the Pointy-Haired Boss gets reamed by his Dilbert codemonkey (gmaxwell) and Wally engineer (pwuille).

TL;DR:

I've been solving blocks on the BTC train longer than you, and (like gmaxwell, tacotime, etc) am perfectly capable of simultaneously riding the XMR train as well.  We old-timers recognize a great train when we see one.  Too bad you missed the first half of the BTC movie and thus cannot tell the difference between a golden donkey and a thoroughbred unicorn.

BTC's "intrinsic value" is the fact is fulfills Aristotle's criteria for good money better than anything else (except Monero).

The BTC price is rising in terms of the last 5/4/3 years.  Zero to $250, by way of $1200.  Excellent performance by any definition.

The price rises when more people act on the optimistic zoomed out view than a cherry-picked local retrace.

The smart money already knows all about the hard UXTO limit, and is therefor investing in systems built on the core blockchain which offload tx pressure to sidechains and other off-main-chain whatnot.

The UXTO constraint may never be solved in an acceptable (sub)linear way, or the solution(s) could for political reasons never be implemented in BTC.

As for the Gresham's Law.

Yes, I do want people to HLOD their BTC.  Hoarding helps the price in terms of fiat trash rise, and invigorates the beneficial feedback loops driving adoption which ultimately result in a race condition that breaks petrodollar hegemony.  It's the Cartmanland principle: if people can't have Bitcoin they will want it more than ever.


Bro, do you even Nassim Taleb? 

If you did, you'd already know antifragile systems require adversity to grow stronger (BTW, BTC is not analogous to The Titanic).

If we coddle BTC and indulge it with lavish 20mb blocks to protect Gavin's delicate little feelings, it starts becoming a fat lazy Dodo Bird.  Like a child's immune system, BTC must encounter antigens to learn about its environment and prevent auto-immune diseases.

I'm getting really sick and tired of you faint-hearted hand-wringing Doubting Thomas, Panicky Penelope, and Nervous Nellie types.   

You will be punished by Lord Satoshi for your disturbing lack of faith!

(Force_choke.gif)

The reason we have to worry about miners producing "too large" blocks is because they don't pay for all the P2P network resources they use (neither do end users).

All the arguments we have about resource consumption are derived from that primary design flaw.

If we fix it, then we won't have to argue any more.

I'm far from been an expert, but AFAIU Justus's proposing to remove completely the max block size limit.

His reasoning is based on the fact that block space is a naturally scarce resource and that it should be better
"regulated" by the free market rather than by a "central" authority through the application of production quota.

With "block space price" he meant the cost of adding a tx to a block, that will be computed taking into account
all the needed resources to complete such a task, so: bandwith, storage, etc. etc. involved in being a relay node,
a miner (not hasher) or a full node, you name it.

He then continues arguing that at the moment the bitcoin p2p network lacks of the necessary
price discovery mechanism for such a scarce resource.

To solve the problem this is his proposed solution:


This free competition in an open market introduced by this will avoid the aforementioned
centralization problem.

ps Justus, sorry for any misinterpretations.

Price discovery as commonly described does not work for this because decentralization is a public good. Justus' idea is for clients to connect to multiple peers to express their desire for decentralization but is worthless for the same reason there are dozens of different brands of laundry detergent, breakfast cereal, even chocolate. in the supermarket but only a handful of manufacturers.

But to be realistic, none of the known solutions to this are incredibly good, and at least trying something is probably better than head-in-the-sand. That's what I have supported letting Monero's dynamic block size play out as an experiment, while recognizing problems with it too.

It's a bit different I think, quoting myself here so the experts can make a judgement.

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Only the data feed is centralized, everything else is fully distributed, which is better than centralized (reference the first link that I put up which explains this). A decentralized data feed just wouldn't work and it would be taking a step backwards from the current legacy system unless and until we have more activity than the centralized exchanges. Securities data fees are commodity items, and very easy to corroborate, very difficult to get away with in terms of fraud and/or manipulation.
As for someone in my camp manipulating a data feed, he/she would have a hard time doing so (we get them from 3rd parties) and even a harder time concealing it, and even a harder time than that getting away with it (each client plus the server has the ability to audit, although that is not implemented yet). You'd have to somehow change a data feed, hack into 3 disparate systems to inject that false data feed (whose real feed is freely availalble to all) and then hope nobody notices.
As it stands now, I believe our system is safer than the status quo by a long shot.

Thanks for chipping in! Your other post ("centralized oracle") confirmed my suspicion. I don't share TPTB_need_war's view that that fact makes veritaseum centralized bullshit, though. I suspect it might be a great system. I love the fact that it lives on the bitcoin blockchain and has no other token. I also love that there's no counterparty risk and in addition I'm guessing it ties up some bitcoins in contracts and I do like that, too.

About the "other risk": where is the oracle on your server getting the tickers from? I guess that process should be made transparent at some point so we can at least know how it could be manipulated.

Certainly the incentive is high for some rogue employee somewhere to falsify some ticker feed you're pulling for just long enough for a large bet to be settled in his favor, no? Clearly there's noone capable/willing to fix something like that after the fact.

Thanks for the info regarding the centralized oracle.

I don't understand your comparison to blockchain.info.

good re-read.  and i'm pretty sure he changed that write-up.  initially, he claimed the entire UTXO was held in RAM but down in the Reddit comments for the thread several ppl pointed out that it was held on disk with a 100MB high speed cache.  so, bottom line, it doesn't necessarily appear that this is a problem except for maybe miners.  given that tx growth won't immediately go to 20MB/block, i think it's safe to say this space problem should be worked out in time.

http://gavinandresen.ninja/utxo-uhoh

I may be wrong on details, but this is afaik already used in Monero. And sounds like a good plan.

No, an oracle doesn't represent counterparty risk. If anything it may expose you to execution risk. Counterparty risk is the risk that your counterparty (other side of the trade) reneges or fails to deliver as agreed. That's not possible in our system because we make everyone face the blockchain as a Counterparty via preprogrammed scripts of coin that is used to fully collateralize (and/or overcollateralize) the contracts. At an absolute minimum, each contract is collateralized 100%, after all fees. I'm writing this on my phone so there may be typos.

you can't call me a noob.  and you probably came after me.

what you're missing is that Bitcoin is money born from the internet, by the internet, and for the internet.  it works on the same principles; it can route around damage.  and a key tenet of it's ability to do that is that it is located widely in different jurisdictions round the globe.  even if the US shutdown the internet, it would survive worldwide and the US would be back groveling in a few days wanting to get back on.  especially after pressure from the financial institutions.  

Bitcoin needs to have the same architecture and be spread worldwide to all corners of the Earth for maximum self preservation.  it can't do that if we hamstring it where it is now with just 1MB.  any idiot can see that.  

you want it to be a SOV.  it has the potential to do that.  but it won't happen if you force all tx's offchain to centralized entities, SC's included, that can shut anyone's acct down.  this requires increasing the block size.  all the core devs "say" they want that but they've been dragging their feet for 3y.

as for digital gold, it won't happen if only 0.001% of the global population ever hears about it, let alone uses it.  an African kid will never accept Bitcoin as digital gold as he can't touch it, feel it, carry it in his pocket, weigh it, or wear it.  thus, he will need to be able to transact with it and be able to analyze that it does in fact not increase in supply.  we know that he will have the tools to do this as fiber optic lines are being laid across Africa as we speak.  $10 Android phones are now available and soon 21 and phone makers look prepared to practically give away mining phones to grab market share.  but they have to be able to transact with Bitcoin in a reliable, cheap manner.  only then will they appreciate Bitcoin as a gold substitute.

I see Gavin proposal as a stimulus to get a proper debate. And infact this proposal got it started. And imo we're somewaht moving towards a compromise. See last gavin email on btc dev mailing list:

http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/34094753/

the one i keep hearing getting complained about more so now is the one Ice brought up earlier; UTXO.

i don't get that one.  the UTXO is stored on disk and has a 100MB cache stored in RAM that limits filling it up.  yes, the UTXO set is increasing apparently according to Statoshi, but if it only takes up 100MB, what's the big deal?

All valid reason to keep developing and not accept the 20MB block proposal as a final solution. To attempt solving those problems buy limiting block size is an expression of a lack of creativity

continuing bleakness:

Gavin put it well analysis paralysis, followed by FUD, and the Keynesian notion that a stable monetary system has a constant money velocity.