Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 55. (Read 2032247 times)

i'll be spending more time here:  https://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoin_uncensored/

Unfortunately, "kicking the can" is a common pejorative term which can be thrown like mud at any interim solution.
It is perfectly valid to implement medium-term engineering changes in steps which are not an ideal end-solution, but may be built upon to get there, or replaced entirely when the "ideal" solution is found and achievable. This is particularly true in order to maintain a known current state (i.e. the headroom for growth state which has persisted since Jan 2009) which will undergo an unpredictable state change within 12 months due to inaction.



or a single MB

'Again', eh?  I'd never heard you make that argument before though you are a veritable fountain of desperate nonesense.

But ya, we like totally have to keep them slanty-eyed chinks from horning in on our distributed crypto-currency.

As Gavin says, people are obviously going to trust their own government more than others to manage things in the best interests of their countrymen.  And you never know what those commies would do if they got control.

I LOL'd.  Sad to see Frap.doc is not immune to the contagious stupidity of Reddit, and has been reduced to posting cute doggy pics in place of his formerly astute analysis and insight.

It's almost as if Team Gavin had something on him and is forcing this daft, nonsensical, out-of-character recent misbehavior.   

The fact that there are two phases in the communication is what allows the block solution to be compressed by a factor of γ (the coding gain).  The model takes this into account.

Basing the argument on information theory is problematic because there are 2 phases to the communication (txn exchange and block solution broadcast) and we are just focused on the second phase.  Observations like communication must be proportional to # txns apply to the whole communication not its parts.

i agree with this view.  the relay network is cutting corners and making risky shortcuts in relaying w/o essentially verifying.  it only recently added a node in Beijing within the GFC.  i wonder though if it's origins were a means of compensating for the top 5 largest miners being in China?

again, one of my reasons for wanting to increase blocksize is to increase competition in mining outside of China to those who have greater bandwidth.  this would help level the playing field.

Using logic, I can see two possible reason for being a block minimalist developer.

1)  Since "Uh oh, here it is we who decide the size of the blocks", because having power is good. Since there is no consensus within the self appointed dominator group, we have to wait until the royals can come to agreement.

2) They want to suffocate bitcoin, permanently if possible, to get a head start on their endevour into competing systems.

What is Bitcoin if not a community of individuals independently deciding to use and ascribe value to something other than government fiat money and to create their own construct for money.

Yours and the other dev's view of BitcoinXT, is no different from Krugman's and Yellen's view of Bitcoin. i.e. "You people can't define what is money because we already said it is this and anyone who disagrees is delusional". Well guess what, you are as delusional as Krugman and Yellen.

And yes, reddit is a more accurate view of the total bitcoin ecosystem then the dev's mailing list.

 And if not, that doesn't matter either, the whole point of Bitcoin is that I can make my own choices, and me and others are free to leave the current Bitcoin and choose our own path. If you don't want to transact on my chain, then fine, that is your choice, but I've already decided to not transact on yours.

Right, the reconciliation process will take time (information must be communicated), and the amount of time will have a lower limit proportional to the Shannon Entropy in the new block.  One could argue that the Shannon Entropy in a new block will not in general be proportional to the size of the block, but that doesn't make any sense to me.  In fact, the only way I can imagine that it would be possible is if the block solutions contain no information about the included transactions at all (i.e., the case of infinite coding gain).  But if there's no information communicated about the transactions included in a block, then in my opinion the miners aren't peers but slaves and the system is already centralized.  

If the network is composed of peers who build blocks based on their own volition, then I argue that information (Shannon Entropy) about the transactions contained within the new blocks must be communicated as part of the block solution.  If this is the case, the fee market will remain healthy (according to the definition of a healthy fee market given in feemarket.pdf).

If my understanding of IBLT is correct, its main advantage is that the quantity of information transmitted on the wire is constant, whatever the number of transactions inside the block.

IMHO, it's fair to say that propagation of these data is not the whole story. There's a reconciliation to be done between the new block and the local mempool but I think it's also fair to make the hypothesis that with such a mechanism in place, mining pools may have an incentive to keep an exhaustive mempool (in order to avoid the burden of requesting missing transactions and to increase their performances/profits).

Anyway, I think we can say that with an IBLT, some operations will depend on the number of transactions (in mempool and new block) but for now, I don't know how the delay introduced by these operations would compare with the delay related to the propagation in the network (in term of order of magnitudes).

This study is very interesting, because from an engineering point of view, having a mechanism requiring constants resources (time or space) is the "holy grail" but according to your paper that may also imply the birth of an unhealthy fee market (and a new challenge for bitcoin .

As said many times by others, current solutions just kick the can down the road and a proper solution for propagation in the network remains to be found and implemented (imho the relay network should be considered as a temporary "patch" (no offense intended to its creator) and shouldn't become a replacement of the p2p network).

Understanding the economic consequences of future solutions is really needed before we decide to go down the road and not so much has been done until now. So, keep up the good work !

About censorship:

The current mob campaigning against censorship is precisely the same group that has spent the last couple months downvoting censoring  each and every reasonable and perfectly valid argument brought against block size increase or any thing that did not fit in their groupthink.

For that reason I am thoroughly enjoying the little hissy fit they are now throwing

little dog means just that; little.

and btw, try using 880 as the value and tell me what your peabrain thinks.

poor guy.. you are even more naive than I thought.

the point YOU (and quite a few here) dont seem to understand is that the reddit mob in no way, shape or form defines "the community".

if there is a consensus amongst anyone with half a brain it is that no sane discussions on the topic of the block size debate can be had over there. The post I included explain exactly while it is so.

now you can keep fooling yourself with delusions of community consensus or get a grip and realise that no amount of upvotes or downvotes will shift the balance in the outcome of this issue.

I thought for a minute that you may have figured out the incredibly complex technology required to make your images appropriately sized for your post (hint:  width={nnn} within the opening img tag.)  Guess not.

Great question.  

There's two cases to consider: (1) how an IBLT propagation mechanism will affect spam costs for an attacker, and (2) how it will affect the health of the fee market in general.  

1. IBLT will make spam proportionally more costly for an attacker, since the propagation efficiency of IBLT relies on partially synchronized mempools.  There's more on this here.

2. The paper viewed the IBLT scheme as a way to compress block solutions by some factor γ, where γ represents the coding gain. In this regard, it is similar to the compression already achieved by the Corallo Relay Network, only with a higher coding gain.  Assuming that block solutions are propagated across physical channels, and that the quantity of pure information communicated per solution is proportional to the amount of information contained within the block, then the communication time will always grow asymptotically like O(Q) as per the Shannon-Hartley theorem, and the fee market will be healthy.  In other words, as long as the block solutions contain information in the sense defined by Shannon (also called the Shannon Entropy) about the transactions they contain, then bigger blocks will contain more of it and, by the Shannon-Hartley Carrying Capacity Theorem, the communication speed has a fundamental lower bound governed by the laws of physics.

So to answer your question, my view is that IBLT would not affect the health of the fee market (but it would reduce the average fee per transaction).

This discussion relates to my main point of contention with Greg Maxwell.  In email correspondence, he suggested that it would be possible to have infinite coding gain for block solutions announcement. (I.e., he suggested that block solutions can truly be communicated in an amount of time that does not depend, even asymptotically, on the amount of transactions included in the block.  He said this is possible if what went into a block was already agreed upon far ahead of time [so that zero information needed to be communicated when the block was solved]).  I think the onus is on him to rigorously show:

(a) Under what assumptions/requirements such a communication scheme is physically possible.

(b) That such a configuration is not equivalent to a single entity¹ controlling >50% of the hash power.

(c) That the network moving into such a configuration is plausible.

Nevertheless, I've agreed with him to discuss this point of contention when I make the other corrections to my paper.  

¹For example, if--in order to achieve such a configuration with infinite coding gain--miners can no longer choose how to structure their blocks according to their own volition, then I would classify those miners as slaves rather than as peers, and the network as already centralized.

Well, i upgraded my node to XT. That is how you vote in a decentralized system.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.12105991

Can someone do the same for Bitcoin??

Excellent points.

Bitcoin is at an interesting impasse. I think those in favour of small blocks will force a fork of bitcoin which ironically creates a new chain which instead of becoming 'gavincoin' or 'xt coin' simply becomes bitcoin. This will render the original Core chain worthless overnight, when payment processors and exchanges etc follow the money and investment funding the ecosystem.

To average joe there probably won't be anything to even notice other than price volatility.

Either that or keeping bitcoin crippled for non-technical reasons will mark the point of decline in market capitalisation of the bitcoin chain compared with alternate chain(s). One can imagine value flowing from bitcoin to a successor which scales to the needs of the businesses and users in the ecosystem rather than a small cabal of programmers. I am reminded of the Ernest Hemingway quote about how he went bankrupt. ('Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly'.) It isn't a stretch to see a similar thing happen with bitcoin.

tvbcof:  "woof, woof!":