Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 354. (Read 2032266 times)

ah, of course. IBLT doesn't help the rogue miner because his transactions haven't been broadcast. And he can't broadcast because then he risks losing the tx fees. I had overlooked that.

I'd like to diffuse that a bit: We know it is a better system, because we know the economics of sound money, the cryptography, the computer security and a few special things we have learnt from the whole bitcoin discourse. So, when someone here says that NN does not understand money, even if it is an academic with a life long career in research, writing books, talking to conferences, having had multiple high level jobs and even an economic prize from the swedish central bank in memory of Alfred Nobel, he does not necessarily have a big ego, but rather the courage to say what he knows to be right and unafraid to be coerced (by display of power) into holding back. And, not having a stake in academia (and being anonymous) helps.

At a basic level, we all are here because we believe the current system is broken, that most others are wrong,  and that we know why and know of a better system (Bitcoin or some other form of sound money). It takes a certain amount of ego to take on that view of the world.

The fact that we are right in knowing that Bitcoin is a better system, is immaterial. It takes a large amount of Ego to believe you are right and the vast majority are wrong.

Well to be fair, the reason why we don't see this attack is because with the 1MB limit it is not possible to pull off. If BTCGuild started to do this, they could only take 3% of the blocks to 1MB, which is immaterial.

I think it would technically be very easy for a pool/miner to add a huge number of transactions into a block. For every address they have with 1BTC, they could create 10,000 transactions with 0.0001 fee each  (which they receive back in the coinbase transaction) by simply creating a chain of transactions in rapid succession. With 100BTC, they cloud create 1M transactions at zero cost because they would only include the transactions in their own block and recover the fees.

In the real world though, a pool could only do this a few times before miners would abandon them en mass, destroying the pool's business in the process. So it seems unlikely

At large solo miner with maybe 0.1% or 0.3% of the hash rate could start to inject very large 1GB blocks every 200 or 400 blocks or so, but in that case I could very easily see the rest of the pools agreeing to ignore those massive blocks. And even if they didn't coordinate to ignore them, the large blocks would propagate so slowly they might not be included anyway. (The attack requires transmitting a full block since Gavin's IBLT wouldn't help here).

Another way to address the issue of one or two rouge pools making large blocks, is to set a floating blocksize cap that resets with each difficulty adjustment and is based on an average of the last x number of blocks plus some overhead. Now to implement the attack an attacker would need to create false transactions that everyone mines on to bring up the average, but this would become too expensive since the fees would be lost to other miners.

Go to statoshi.info and look at "tx and blocks" section to have an idea of the trend

Well they are valid in the sense that the outputs exist and the signatures are correct, so an attacking miner could just include them all. Not that it concerns me.

Rant: in the beginning, I had the blockchain page up at all times, a bit concerned when there was no new block in an our or so. Not any more /Rant'

that's even stronger evidence against this attack.

if the available unconf tx's are mostly invalid b/c of dust limits or being non-std, then those couldn't be included in such a bloated block.

2MB, not much.  thus, it appears an attacker would have to construct and broadcast all his own fake or withheld tx's to try and perform this bloated block attack which, imo, is way too expensive and risky even though he would be paying himself his own tx fees.

i ask b/c of this bloated block attack being floated around.

we know that full nodes have unconf tx sets that correspond by somewhere over 90%; which is why IBLT could work to communicate across the network that a new block has been solved.  the ppl who argue against raising the 1MB cap say that an attacker could create these bloated blocks to torment small miners.  the question is, where would they get the extra tx's to construct this bloat?  from the unconf tx set or would they have to construct them themselves at considerable cost?  to answer this, it would be helpful to know the extent to which the unconf tx set gets cleared out every 10 min per block and the absolute size of the set so as to determine how many unconf tx's are left over that could be used in such an attack.

if i look at my 4 full nodes memory use, it's averaging around 200MB, but with around 500-600MB VSwap.  as i understand it, VSwap is to be considered a form of memory use so the total is around 800MB, which is consistent across my nodes:

I have glanced over that page a few times, and it seems, when it is high (4000 tx or more), it is filled with transactions that are never going to be included; dust, and zero fee transactions that should have a fee due to size and output age. Logically, when blocks are not full, the queue of valid transactions should be zero. I think we will not see a long list of valid unconfirmed transactions before we are quite close to the block size limit on a 24 hour basis.

https://blockchain.info/en/unconfirmed-transactions

Is this idle curiosity or important to you?  If important probably I could fork the satoshi client and instrument it.  But then we'd have to collect data, etc. Its a medium time length project.

WRT TPTB/Anonymint, I vote that we put the speculation and constructive advice to bed at this point (I think he's heard enough), and rely on volunteers to very selectively quote and respond to his few information-filled bitcoin-related sentences.

I also thought so

Aren't they the same person/thing?

You're talking about TPTB, not Anonymint, I quite enjoined Anonymint'w posts in other threads. The boxing video inputs pushed the topic of Bitcoin out of my entertainment zone. On the leval of digital binary his signal to noise ratio was very low.

One's attention is the most valuable commodity today, approximately 50% of the cost of making a new car today is spent on getting your attention.

TPTB (no pun intended) would be a little more effective if he understood the value of attention.

Let me ask again.

Does anyone know the average number of unconfirmed TX's that exist in mempool at any given time, the average size in MB (i know <1) and what % of them get cleared into a block every 10 minutes or so?

Well to the extent that 2-way communication is required, yes.

Much can be gained from 1-way transmit of information as well, and I for one don't hesitate to call me a guru in a field where I obviously am one, and a disciple in another.

Communication between peers might be pleasant but in the end does not acquire that much. The change happens when the communication crosses borders of classes.

I disagree. From my pov, everybody here has ego issue to some extend. Anonymint just has a slight différent view of the situation worldwide. Maybe more desperatly cynical. But i value his inputs as much as others around here. On the end i think we all want the same: bitcoins success, pocket money, and a fairer world.

The Gentleperson's Guide To Forum Spies (spooks, feds, etc.)

I've been pointing out that you seem to be exhibiting the most ego-driven behavior around here. But the nature of one with a big ego is that they do not respond to feedback concerning their ego so the reaction will be aggressive.

What a shame. Your self-proclaimed superior intelligence is going to waste, because you package your messages in a way which makes it very hard to respond to the message itself (which is often obfuscated) and instead lends itself to focusing on your ego-mania. You'll mostly get other egos lashing out at you, further fueling your story about sub-par beta-males being jealous of your superiority, ignorance or trolling. We could have a useful discussion but instead it seems to me that in spite of your rhetoric that is not what primarily motivates you - instead you write lengthy posts focusing on your person, supposedly "proving" your superiority, demanding admiration and constructing negative feedback as admiration clothed in jealousy. No fun and no profit in that I fear. You cut yourself off from valuable feedback and we don't get anything useful out of the interaction either.

I have respect for many people frequenting this thread and posting material which makes me think and I am grateful for that. I have respect for you because of the same thing - your writings have made me think and research as well. That is why I care and keep pointing this out to you. If you really want to be useful and harvest your abilities for the advancement of common good, get off your high horse, stop making everything about yourself and talk to us like a decent human being.

Communication is possible only between equals