Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 317. (Read 2032265 times)

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His post is mostly FUD because he is pushing an Anti-Gavin agenda and myopically assumes himself to be on the winning side rather than looking at the system as a whole.

If the world was beautiful and clean a fork would instantly separate the networks, so if you had N coins on Bitcoin, you'd now have N on BitcoinA and N on BitcoinB.  Someone would then quickly put up an exchange site that let you trade BitcoinA for BitcoinB, so you could sell the side you think will lose and buy the other, or choose nothing, in which case you'd end up unaffected (that is, still with N coins) once one fork dwindled to nothing.

But the reality is more complicated and you'd need careful code analysis and probably simulation to figure it out.  Yes you have N coins on both forks but the problem is that when you issue a transaction, it will be picked up by BOTH forks.  You can't spend on just one fork!  Your txn is valid on both, and even if you figure out how to "trigger" it on just one fork, the receiver could reissue it on the other thereby "stealing" your coins on the other fork.

But in theory the receiver would not have to; pending transactions won't be purged, so BitcoinA and BitcoinB would process the same transactions on different blockchains forever, keeping the forks in sync.  In practice, the smaller blockchain would probably drop some pending transactions eventually, resulting in a slow divergence.  Could you force this divergence?  It would take careful code analysis to figure out a way, but it would certainly be messy and probability based.  But eventually when transactions increase to consistently exceed the capacity of blocks in the smaller chain it would chew up all RAM and crash the code today (as per Mike Hearn's analysis).  But if patches were added clean that up, then finally you'd be able to pretty reliably target a transaction to a particular fork (by giving a txn fee too low for the fork with smaller blocks, for example).  Once you get the first single-fork transaction, you can now spend those coins independently because they are on different addresses on different forks.

At that point, both forks would see and attempt to apply each other's transactions, so you end up with lots of spends from "invalid" addresses "spamming" the network.  This would be a huge mess for statistics, visibility and analysis sites like blockchain.info.

Rather then risk the mess above, it would probably be better to add a "version" field to the transactions (and every other protocol message), change this version field EVEN if that protocol message didn't actually change, and have clients ignore messages of the wrong version.  Write your new clients to rev the version field once a particular block # is mined.  This would get you a clean separation.

In Bitcoin you "vote" for what will happen to your own money, not other people's money. This is the big difference, and the reason why the state can not co-opt it.

Mircea proposes something similar as an attack or defense against Gavincoin.

http://qntra.net/2015/01/the-hard-fork-missile-crisis/
http://trilema.com/2015/if-you-go-on-a-bitcoin-fork-irrespective-which-scammer-proposes-it-you-will-lose-your-bitcoins/

You can love him or hate him but he does have a certain amount of both funding and following...

Gotta love bitcoin drama, lol

I agree with that assessment, except for the "rendering all their hardware useless" part. I've expressed the same point a different way already. The miners that won't take an ethical stand would continue to mine the bitcoin network, and the economic majority might find their minds will change when they are similarly pressurised.


I'm not sure whether you're defining the boundaries of this particular game too leniently. You're approaching this from the perspective of the miners self-interest in respect of each other, but they're not the only actors playing, and monetary systems are not the only game dynamic. What stops government saying "never mind your sound money game, allow me to introduce you to the game we're actually playing..."

in honor of John Nash:

https://twitter.com/cypherdoc2/status/602533856290349056

What do you say to the argument that, if the miners ever enforced rules that were unacceptable to the economic majority, that we'd push Adam Back's "big red button" by forking the protocol, rendering all their hardware useless?

There is no "practical uselessness" to this property of the bitcoin system in anything like the way you present with your comparison; there is no similarity in the logic at all. One is a question of statistical probability of guessing a number from an impracticably sized domain. And the resolution depends only on the math. The other has nothing to do with any branch of mathematics at all, it's about decisions made by humans, dependent only on social or moral values. I do not take your comparison seriously, Peter.

And you're saying the same thing that anyone else seems to: that because miners do not and have not censored transactions, they never will. This is clearly not the case, and I would argue it's an unwise assumption.

I dunno; that doesn't seem like a useful way to look at it.  By similar logic, could one not state:

   Either Blockchain signatures are forgeable or unforgeable

and then, since there's a 1 in 1461501637330902918203684832716283019655932542975 odds of picking a private key that will allow you to forge a signature, conclude that:

    Blockchain signatures are forgeable  

It's technically true, but practically useless.  

Anyways, is this not just semantics? According to my definition, Bitcoin is permissionless.  If it ever becomes non-permissionless, then it would cease being Bitcoin.  Maybe that's a more useful way to look at it.  The question then becomes, will it ever stop being bitcoin?

I thought Adrian-X made a great comment about this (riffing on the point ZB often makes, and related to the question Cypherdoc asks above):


Does the ecomonic majority want permissionless, borderless bitcoin or something else?

And given that most likely of outcomes in my apparently extreme scenario, bitcoin ceases to be. You state this in a way that implies an unavoidable consequence: that no-one would risk such an outcome, as the stakes are too high for something as trivial as having a "sound" (i.e. Keynesian) money system, right? I don't believe you're imagining this from the perspective of a) the tiny minority of influential figures in government and corporations, or b) the majority of people who are ignorant not just to cryptocurrency, but even their regular currency.

need some opinions on this, from Reddit:

"Second, if push comes to shove and we end up with a fork battle then whoever holds the most will have the most power in choosing which wins out anyway. They can simply sell on one fork and buy on the other to shift the relative values. Whichever fork ends up most valuable will attract the most miners. Stronger value and security will attract more users to that fork."

is this viable?  this could be interesting...

It is highly unlikely to happen as radically as you describe.  If this were to happen, then most likely we would end up with an Austrian fork and a Keynesian fork dueling it out, which I could see possibly happening.  Users would have to make a choice between one or the other, or a combination of the two.  This is the likely outcome in your scenario because bitcoin is global and can be forked easily.  The dollar or Euro cannot be forked with a new set of rules applied, so this scenario is impossible with legacy currencies.

Either it is or it isn't. This is the exact issue I'm trying to draw attention to. It is a big assumption to make that the pressure for miners to conform to government edicts will not increase in step with bitcoin's influence on world finance. By the time that happens, and without an alteration in the barriers to entry for mining or the miners ability to control transactions, then mining centralisation will become even more entrenched.

How are you going to feel if a future mining majority decides that Austrianism is no longer fashionable any more, and Keynesianism is back? 500 BTC superwhales could end up with something closer to 500 dollars.

I used the term 'permission-minimized.'  How many times has someone been prevented from spending their coins?  None that I am aware of.  It's just another theoretical attack that doesn't work in practice.

This is a good point really, this question raised a flay in my mind, what option would you go with ?

Me, myself, will go with the adaption of the bitcoin rules.

if it wasn't it would be worth a lot more,

I'm long on Bitcoin, but there is a lot going on and lots of politics. in practice what I'm seeing is political pressure is rivaling the mechanics that makes up the protocol.
This is a huge risk to the future of Bitcoin imo many don't see it as they are practical motivated and circumvent social engineering and political situations. If you can tweak the mechanics of the protocol by leveraging political pressure then Bitcoin will be leveraged by political pressure. Bitcoin does what the economic majority want, the only question in my mind is does the economic majority want to adopt the immutable rules of Bitcoin, or does the economic majority want to tweak the rules by manipulating politics.

So, bitcoin is permissionless? I don't see how it's possible to sensationalise such a basic fact. Bitcoin holders can be prevented from spending their bitcoin by a majority of miners: that's just plain statement of facts. Another would be that, currently, no organised scheme exists to politicise the validity of bitcoins. And a further dispassionate fact would be that there always remains a risk that miners will end up in such a scheme while the system still permits it.


The risk that a counter party represents to your assets (not the same way the expression is applied with physical commodities, but I don't see that as a technical let-off). Bitcoin holders can be prevented from spending their bitcoin by a majority of miners.




None of that is a practical way around transaction censorship, and certainly not as a solution for all users of bitcoin. The block solution difficulty is just too high for that, and will remain out of reach to all but professional miners until that dynamic can be changed. Someone in the development forum just today came up with "Helical blockchains" as a solution to mining centralisation, more thought needs to go towards that side of things IMO.

because it's about the blockchain technology




isnt there a Blockchain Foundation somewhere by now?

Still I don't get it, why bitcoin is risky put with all movements and effort that are put into ?

In my mind Summers, knows who the insiders and outsiders are, he is both strong and smart enough to have the foresight to passed up the blue pill, yet being an adviser to Bitcoin start ups is still enough of a buffer to avoid swallowing the red pill.

In my view he is a Professor Bitcoin with lots of wisdom, he seems well positions to ride the Bitcoin wave, or just sit on his surfboard and enjoy the sun.

all the TPTB conspiracy is a bit much at the moment, Bitcoin is not a sure thing by any means, if it were this bear market would turnaround.
If Bitcoin is a highly engendered event, what we could be seeing at this point in time is a  practical review of how big can this scale, even an economic fitness test for both Bitcoin insiders and outsiders.
Bitcoin is still the best shot civilization has at functioning practically. Bitcoin shouldn't escape this downtrend until it is understood it can scale, and while Gavin tackles that, I agree with him that Bitcoin is still a very risky put.