Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 372. (Read 2032266 times)

you fail to comprehend what i was saying.  the above is simply an observation of mine on human behavior which i think is valid.  Satoshi's brilliance was that he designed what appears to be a rock solid system that allows it's participants to fulfill their desired behaviors w/o fear of widespread cheating.  the incentives programmed into Bitcoin align with their desired behaviors and in fact fosters them.  the need for trust is removed for the early adopters.  bootstrappers like me saw this brilliance and have invested accordingly and each day that goes by that the protocol doesn't get hacked or that a miner or a cabal of miners fails to perform a 51% is evidence that the system is getting stronger and stronger and more resilient.  what's quite obvious is that more and more deep pocketed investors are climbing onboard which makes it much harder for gvts or any bad actor to interfere. we're experiencing a growing economy.

if there is any trust necessary it will come from non-tech types who can't understand all the nuances and game theory i've outlined above.  but their trust is irrelevant for this trustless system to work.  they will learn to "trust" the system as it is.  the longer Bitcoin stays unhacked the greater that trust will grow from the masses.  we're seeing it all around us and ppl like you can't seem to see it. b/c you're a tech you fall squarely into the group i long ago defined:

"The geeks fail to understand that which they hath created"


what centralization?  i see the charts decentralizing.  and the proof in the pudding is that there are still no 51% attacks despite your FUD and Bitcoin keeps on growing.  and ghash has been reduced to a shadow of itself.

Nice! Straight to the top. Looks like it's on course for several hundred.

An attacker with 49% of the hashpower will succeed in double-spending a 6-confirm transaction 96% of the time: 

At 49% the odds of reversing 6 confirmations may not be 1/1000, but they are still quite low probability, low enough that it is not a reliable attack.

No!

6 confirmations comes from the assumption of the attacker having 10% hash rate or less (represented by q in the quote below)


As the attacker's share of the the hash rate approaches 50% the situation gets much, much worse. At 45% in his example you need >340 confirmations for the attack to succeed less than 1/1000.

This is where the 6 confirmation rule comes from. Even if someone had 49% hash power it, the probability that they could role back 6 blocks is negligible. So if you have 6 confirmations the odds that a high but less than 50% attacker could reverse a payment is too low to matter. But once you have 51%, you can always determine the longest chain and could eventually roll back any number of blocks.

Thanks.  I just submitted a slightly-beautified version to /r/bitcoin:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/35fbqy/code_red_dead_ahead_historical_chart_of_average/

The question then becomes whether or not any technical solution is possible against attackers who have printers and aren't afraid to use them.

Wouldn't it suck to implement countermeasures against such attackers that not only won't work and also hinder legitimate use or, even worse, make attacks more likely instead of less likely?

I would say his comment was optimistic, a bit noncommittal, and backed by no analysis or argument, unless you know of something beyond the white paper.

His entire argument about the security of multiple confirmations fails in the presence of concentration, since it relies on the premise of an attacker being a price-taker with respect to hash power. If he felt the profit motive of a majority miner were enough to render the system secure, he wouldn't bother with the probabilistic game theory. It is quite clear to me that the later is much stronger than the former.

BTW, it is also a myth that >50% is needed to successfully double-spend with a "51%-attack". It is needed to guarantee success, but with a substantial share <50% you still have a significant probability of success for whatever finite number of confirmations is considered "enough" by the recipient. If the payoff is high enough this can easily be worth it.

There was some early silliness with a huge and unsustainable pump shortly after launch ("the Mintpal pump") but if you look at the 365 day charts it's pretty much in line with what Bitcoin has been doing over the same period.

i want to highlight here that monero marketcap(in btc) is now higher than it was during the minpal launch bubble. back then in mid june 2014, only 1.5 million monero existed. with 0.01 per this makes a 15k btc marketcap.

right now we are also floating again around a 15k btc marketcap with 7.5 milllion coins. in april this year we reached nearly a 30k btc marketcap with 7 million coins back then.
very brutal infaltion, but this should be considered when looking at this chart



btw coinmarketcap charts seem to be fucked up anyway, at least the time scale

Yes, but profit based incentives only work if you assume the adversary is motivated by greed. Excepting a major technical failure or something better appearing, the only foes I worry about with respect to bitcoin already own printers - and they aren't afraid to use them!

Again I don't think he was pitching that as the likely scenario. He was arguing that in the exceptional case, the profit motive would guard us. I do remember seeing a quote where he argued that eventually the mining might be done by large corporations, so he was aware eventually the exceptional case might become the normal one. But during this rampup phase we are being sold the "one CPU, one vote" lie to get us to wet our ideological underwear.

Any way, I think the profit motive crap is total nonsense and I expect he knew that. The pools don't have any large investment in hardware. Thus they are free to maximize revenue by any paradigm which does so, including collusion and selling out to the banksters who captured the State and the fiat levers. Economics rules, not morals.

Upthread I broke down the argument that the miners who own the hardware are in control. Sorry (in theory and maybe in practice already) the Sybil attack which are the pools is in control.

If you want to convince me that crypto isn't just another paradigm that falls right into the control of the problem we are trying to fix with crypto, then we need that fundamental tenet of decentralized trust.

There you go again slandering while losing the upthread logic debate. Sheesh you have no shame and no "mea culpa" honor.


In section 4, he says "one CPU, one vote". He is laying out the idealistic case for the Holy Grail of decentralized trust.

You are referring to the exceptional case where he elaborates on the abnormal case where an entity (not necessary one "individual") acquires 50+% of the hashrate. I am not unwilling to discuss his stance on this, but we must start by admitting he didn't think this was the likely case. He believed the "one CPU, one vote" was the likely case, or at least for several years. He was aware that over time it could have to become centralized.

But we were pitched the idealistic case to get us to clamor for and support Bitcoin. And it is that Holy Grail of decentralized trust that is really driving us ideologically to crypto.

So you can't tie in the several posts and figure out the failure in logic, yet you then claim that I don't win the logic arguments.

Your laziness is not an excuse for slandering my reputation.

I do win nearly all of the logic battles (and I always mea culpa the rare ones I don't).

Something that's more interesting than the anonymint noise is the under-appreciated fact that Satoshi believed Bitcoin's profit incentives were so strong that even if an individual accumulated a majority of the hashing power their desire to be profitable in bitcoin terms would be so strong that they wouldn't use that power to attack the network.

Maybe he was right and maybe he was wrong, but the people who are insisting that Bitcoin mining is too centralized should at least start out making their arguments by acknowledging that position and explaining why they believe it is incorrect.

I am sorry but I don't see any quote by justus in there...

Please let us not clog up this thread with personal attacks and prick-waving 

my last post concerning this matter.

What aspect of the following is not a clear failure of logic on the part of justusranvier?


justusranvier, gets so excited to defend his buddy that he failed to read the entire sentence and just focused on finding any random statement in the whitepaper that might be somewhat close to what his buddy was saying. But that is not a refutation of what I wrote, because I didn't allow for any random statement from the whitepaper.

He would need to question my assertion of what is the fundamental tenet of the Satoshi's invention. I claim it is the Byzantine General's solution and not the abnormal case of a 50% attack.

well the trouble with this seems to be that it is you who gets to define by your own standards what exactly constitutes "precise logic" and "fuzzy logic". When following your debates I couldn't shake the feeling that participants were being downgraded to "low-intelligence beta-males" based on whether or not they agreed with your premises and the conclusions you drew from them and not based on any sort of "objective" evaluation of their intelligence/debating skills. So yeah after I saw that obviously I can't change the way you're posting I gave up on a meaningful discussion and just started trolling you I suspect you put me on ignore after that. Ah well, as long as you present some worthwhile interesting material you might be forgiven even for your nasty attitude

I feel like I am back in kindergarten again. A bunch of jealous B-listers playing "nananana" my ears are covered games.