Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 566. (Read 2032291 times)

Your rhetoric is still ridiculous. Users upgrading to the next version of software from where they got it in the first place does not make them "rebels."

This is the part you don't seem to understand. "Bitcoin" is not a static protocol that Satoshi wrote down in a paper six years ago. "Bitcoin" is what the community decides it is. For example, Satoshi's paper does not include a 1 MB block limit, yet that is very much a part of "Bitcoin" today. There are countless other elements of the system that exist in the form they exist today because of specific software that its users choose. Bitcoin tomorrow will likewise in all probability be something different (if there is ever another hard fork; opinions differ but my guess is there will be).

As for the "minuscule CPU/GPU mining network," you are horribly confused about how mining works. A gazillion hashes/second doesn't make the network secure and in fact the number of hashes is completely irrelevant. What matters for the most part is the amount of electricity used and secondarily the cost of the mining equipment. For example 100 watts buys you something on the order of 200 GH/sec of SHA256D. The same 100 watts would buy you perhaps 300 hashes/sec of (to pick one with which I happen to be familiar) CryptoNight. These are approximately equal in value for mining; 200 GH/sec of one algorithm is not 2/3 of a billion times "more secure" than 300 H/s of another. These units are incomparable.

The current bitcoin network is about 150 megawatts. That's something on the order of a 1-2 million PCs using a CPU algorithm. At least until specialized hardware and mining farms developed, a bitcoin forked to a CPU/GPU algorithm would look a lot like a million bitcoin users all mining on their computers. Sounds pretty darn secure to me.


Again, the rhetoric is absurd. An upgraded version of bitcoin with a hard fork (it wouldn't be the first), used by the majority of bitcoin users, is not an altcoin, it is bitcoin. The users adopting it are not rebels, they are bitcoin users.


In your scenario, the cartel has announced its plan in advance and distributed its hard fork version to all the users. The rest of the community can do likewise. There need be no interruption.

Furthermore, under this wartime scenario transactions would likely voluntarily halt anyway, because no one could be sure that the original chain being jammed wouldn't turn out to be the surviving chain, so no one would accept payments that weren't mined on it. That would certainly be an inconvenience and damaging to bitcoin generally, but the cartel would have no advantage absent some ability to guarantee that their fork would succeed, which they can't do.

True its a poor assumption because ghash.io miners are in fact split between several pools.  
This is a different layer of centralization (they can suddenly move them to their own pool, for example).

I mentioned a few of the layers of centralization in my previous post.
-ASIC makers
-Miners
-Pools
-Devs
Each of these are too centralized by some measures.  (the world of bitcoin is still kinda small).

The silly thing that Jorge does is assume that not only will these all perpetually get worse (instead by most evidence they are trending toward better), but that it will be fatal and are fated to be so.  There is not any evidence for his assumption, it appears to simply be prejudicial.  He started here with it and it may be his job to perpetuate it since he does work for the State.

Appreciated, outahere - but IMO that would not really solve the problem, that ATM every post seems like "cherry-picking" to (back)troll.
But since a lot of posters in this discussion seem to have an "academic background" a more reasonable "container" would make a lot of sense (again IMO)...

You presume ghash miners are used on it's own pool. It's a fair assumption, but it might behoove ghash to make a deal with other pools for no fee mining in the interest of decentralization.

I for one would like to see Jorge put some money where his (big) mouth is.

I did understand the so called logic, but it was false.

It is false because it assumes all such lists are showing power, but in fact they all show something else, generally pools. I've never seen a "mining power list," have you?

Even with a relatively small number of pools you can still have power distributed over many thousands (or even more) independent miners, because those miners are able to move their hash rate. No pool can be confident of maintaining a given share because hash power can shift and new pools can be created.

In fact this was not the case with ghash since much of their mining was their own equipment.

I'll let you pick one and I'll point out the fallacy and google the discussion if necessary.

Without taking sides: A Q&A or matrix or whatever for each argument (and counter-argument) would help the undecided.
Any source available?

Please stop feeding the troll. All as in 100% of his arguments have been debunked or already have solutions planned. He is very good at using fallacious arguments. Don't play into them. They are easy to spot because they have few details. If you challenge them, he doesn't answer you directly, instead he plays another trick.

I forgot the word 'evenly' before 'distributed'.   (I used it elsewhere when saying that same condition.)
Is that why you did not understand the logic?

(I don't recall whether I replied to that here or on reddit.)  The "Red Button" solution is the third option that, in my summary above, each user would have: upgrade to a different protocol that the cartel miners cannot mine.

That option is a suicide only for the rebel users, since all the miners, whether they like the change or not, would be forced to abandon the rebels and join the cartel ranks.  The rebel users would then find themselves in a new altcoin, with a fourth blockchain (4)  that wuld not use the bitcoin protocol, supported by a minuscule CPU/GPU mining network.  Their rebelBTCs would not be accepted by users or services who converted, and they would not be able to receive cartelBTCs from them.  


Unless I missed something, in the plan that I outlined the cartel will earn both cartelBTC and rebelBTC rewards throughout the transition.  Depending on the outcome of the attack they will lose one of the two, but the other is still double what they would earn by fair play.

The rebels could try to take revenge from the cartel by stealing their rewards, but they could do that only in the rebel altcoin.



The bitcoin industry will surely choose the fork that is expected to have most users.   The cartel fork will have all the miners and 500 PH/s (say) of hash power.  Rebel users will be unable to use the network for days until they upgrade to the red button version; while users who give in to the cartel will not suffer any inconvenience.  The design of the economic game part of the protocol has always assumed that the players are greedy and will choose their behavior so as to maximize their immediate gain; but that would make them switch immediately to the cartel version.  The network has always been controlled by the miners, only that now the power is concentrated in half a dozen companies.  

I am not predicting that the next halving will be postponed.  That plan I described is an example of how a 51% cartel can force a change of protocol, presented in response to claims that a 51% "attack" cannot do that.

A similar plan could be used tomorrow by the top 4 miners to, say, reverse the last halving and restore the reward to 50 BTC/block.  (But of course this change would cause a lot more commotion.  By 2016 people hopefully will have accepted the fact that the miners do rule the network.  )


Well, I described a plan for a protocol-change "attack" and pointed out the options, incentives, and risks that each player would have.  Some people expressed their beliefs about how the players would react to a different attack (and called them facts).  I disagreed.

I understood that empty blocks do not cost more to mine than normal blocks, and pay the 25 BTC reward just like them.  Isn't this true?  (Transaction fees are still negligible -- less than 20 BTC/day, compared to 3600 BTC/day for rewards.)

According to the script I described, the cartel does not need to increase its hashing power during the transition, and does not
lose the block rewards, whether it succeeds or fails in the attempt.


Users who do not upgrade will have their bitcoins blocked for as long as the cartel wants to.  Meanwhile, users who upgrade early will not even notice the transition, and those who upgrade after the deadline will immediately recover access to their coins.


Why? Objectively, it would be as if Satoshi himself had written "2018" instead of "2016" in the reward halving schedule.

Do you mean that it would show that the protocol is not resistant to change, as many believe?  But, unless there is a flaw that I still can't see, the plan could succeed.  So bitcoin is already useless?


Exactly.

Black holes everywhere:

It is not "one miner".  It is 51% of the haspower having decided to do something that will bring millions additional revenue to all miners.

And that is precisely why the 51% attack is a problem: because 51% of the hashpower may be just one miner, and yet that miner WILL prevail against all the others.  That is a fundamental feature of the protocol.  When it was designed, it was called "one CPU, one vote instead of one man, one vote", and it was believed that the difference between those two concepts would not be significant.  Now we have seen that the two are vastly different.


As I have pointed out several times, users can reject blocks, but cannot create them; only miners can.  The users do not own the mining equipment, the miners (obviously) do.  So the millions of users can scream and cuss as much as they want, but they cannot control or harm the miners, not even deny them the block rewards.  Even if all the users reject all the blocks that the miners mine, they will not be able to interact with other users, or get any transactions in the blockchain, if the miners will not serve them. And a cartel that has 51% of the hashpower can close the network to all competing miners, and to all millions of users who are using the current protocol, whatever that is.  Even if the users try to mine with their CPUs, they will not have enough hashpower to get through the cartel's jamming.  Is any of these statements wrong?

When the banks get together and decide to raise some fee, their millions of users may scream and cuss as much as they want, but cannot stop the banks from doing that.  Some rebel users may take their cash out, and perhaps try to create their own informal banks; but most users would continue using the banks, because they would rather pay the extra fee than do without their services.  That is reality.  Why do you think that bitcoin users and bitcoin miners would behave differently?


But that is not how a 51% cartel can jam the honest chain.  Read my outline, PLEASE.

Assuming the bet was for a non-trivial amount, it would suggest that you actually believed the claims you're making.  Like the PoW miners, you'd be putting your resources at risk. 

I think this debate regarding mining centralization has gone as far as it can with you.  You presented your theories (and called them facts).  Many people provided counter arguments as to why it won't play out the way you imagined.  You disagreed.  

Smooth then offered you a chance to wager on what, according to your logic, is almost guaranteed to occur (that the block reward halving wouldn't happen).  You made excuses and declined.  

There's that sweet smell again:

Euro-Area Prices Seen Falling as Risk of Deflation Spiral Mounts

http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2015-01-07/euro-area-prices-seen-falling-as-risk-of-deflation-spiral-mounts.html

Given the cost, you can't mine empty blocks for long even though the blockchain can support empty blocks and will support the longest chain, but that doesn't invalidate past transactions or future ones or constitute a change to the protocol supported by the p2p nodes. Transactions resume after the attack.

That type of attack you describe would be prohibitive in terms of cost, if successful it would render Bitcoin useless, given the cost to participate un-cooperatively, any actor would stand to gain more by cooperating.  

But that said, miners can change the protocol but all nodes need to accept the blocks in order to be valid, so the change is limiting but as BlockStream have pointed out disruption of the incentive stasis is possible with such a change it's called a SideChain soft fork, in this scenario centralization is both inevitable and bad.

If miners were ever allowed control the flow of Bitcoin and earn it through mining at the same time then yes it would constitute a fail of the protocol.

The evil doers may even trick the miners into supporting such a change by offering them additional mining revenue, should that happen miners won't be dependent on the p2p Bitcoin nodes to validate there blocks and rewards, they could depend on a cacophony of financial products governed by rules set by a central authority to provide income.

So yes we're at a junction, but no, the protocol hasn't failed yet.  

What difference would the bet make?

I am not claiming that my hunch about the future is better than you faith.  I am not making predicitons.  As I already said, the survival of the network and the price of BTC are not the issue. 

I claimed that the bitcoin protocol does not provide a decentralized p2p payment scheme.  That should be obvious from the fact that 51% of the hash power is controlled by a handful of companies.  Mining is now centralized; that is a fact.

People have retorted that it is not really centralized because the piechart changes over time; or that GHash was forced to shrink.  Do I need to explain again why those facts are irrelevant?

People have claimed that a 51% cartel could not do anything except jam the network.  That is false, it is well known that they can do many nasty things besides just jamming. 

People claimed that a 51% cartel cannot do harm because the users decide which blocks are valid, so the miners cannot do anything against the will of the majority of the users.  That is false, and I explained why.

I observed that an entity that can jam a process can force users to accept changes to that process.  In particular, I observed that a 51% cartel can force a change in the protocol.  People denied that based on (1) implicit assumptions the cartel would try to do only "attacks" of a certain type, (2) statements of faith about how users and other miners woud react to such attempts and (3) claims that the users and miners who objected to the attack could prevent the change.  So I described in detail a plausible "attack" that did not fit those assumptions, pointed out that most miners (even those outside the cartel) would want the change and would cooperate with the cartel, and that users would submit to the change because it would not harm them directly, whereas rebellion could. And showed why the rebellious users and miners would not be able to stop the change.

So, where would my bet fit in the above?  Or my profession, or my IQ?

See the level he's dragged you down to?