Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 584. (Read 2032291 times)

Its not clear why you think adding an spv-multisig is worse than multisig or IOUs with offchain holdings (as most exchanges are doing).  That seems reversed to me.  What does it put at risk?

Adam

These sorts of crypto "white papers" are not really academic papers at all. They are marketing for a piece of software (perhaps still under development). They vary in presentation from somewhat academic to not academic at all, but at their core they are entirely different in goals and methodology as you explain

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_paper#In_business-to-business_.28B2B.29_marketing

China may come back.

Gold is a currency since the humanity existed.

Gold can't be equal to a 4-year-old-pumpanddump scam.

Btc is failing badly btw.

I think we can create blockchain (sidechain) from any data.

There are 2 orthogonal things.
 1) create chain (it can be done by single server .. e.g. Bitstamp trade engine => no MM, no federated server )
 2) verify chain and unlock bitcoins (this can be done by bitcoin network)

Right.


Well its interesting you should say that - there were discussions that the script language could have been extended during the p2sh discussion at the time.  eg there was no reason the script inside p2sh couldnt have been a different script language.  Lets say that script had been done, then sidechains might've been possible without a separate change.

Also as I mentioned a few times its already very close to possible to implement a compact SPV verify in bitcoin script.  Anyone of dozens of minor changes to slightly improve expressiveness of bitcoin script would allow it.  It seems close to inevitable that sooner or later an expressiveness or refactor or clean up of bitcoin script will happen, for its own sake and reason: to make it easier or safer to write smart-contracts etc.

About cypherdoc particularly he said this:


While its possible, its very much harder, and when changes are made its very much riskier and less secure.  If you care about the security of your coins you should be for having a firewalled live beta and firewalled extension mechanism (if you support improvements "i'm all for that." you said).


CP = CounterParty.  That doesnt bring anything to the chain, other than bloat, its a layered consensus system with its own alt-coin.  If you valued the price of bitcoin, probably you'd be better pushing for sidechains than CP because its bitcoin denominated and increases demand and features for bitcoin.

(Not sure whats up with bitcoin price - maybe its time for reverse psychology: big negative news, generates lots of free press, and there's no such thing as bad press?)


No they spent more time on core than before, because they quit their full time jobs/occupation and Mark said somewhere else on reddit he figured they'd spent 50% of their time at blockstream on core.  (Unrelated to sidechains most of it .. eg in Pieter's case the headers-first speed up you were mentioning, though he's been working on that for a long time).  You could check by looking at bitcoin github, there's a stats page.


I fail to see the connection between sound money and an ability to freeze coins with an spv-multisig instead of a multisig.
Bitcoin is protected with a firewall from features on the sidechain.  The bitcoins never leave the chain, they're just frozen in an spv-multisig instead of a multisig.  Lots of people are using multisigs, daily, to effectively do the same thing, its more secure to do it with an spv-multisig.  Lots of people are not even doing that, they're using pure offchain in a shared wallet, for reasons that in time could be fixed on sidechains and then with a year of live testing with $1b on it kind of assurance, ported back into bitcoin main.


Yes, it is that hard.  Maybe I dont know do you follow bitcoin-dev, look at github, follow wizards and dev irc?  Making changes to a $4b system is very risky.  op-spv can avoid and reduce that risk, once it is done.

Adam

It's not that I'm feeding anybody but for everyone interested in keeping this thread signal/noise ratio as high as possible, I've taken the liberty to quote the excellent Peter R's categorization of a particular kind of user:

If the COIN ETF is approved, perhaps it will open a large market of private investors in the US (savings and retirement accounts, etc.) 

Latin America could be such a market, but there does not seem to be a population of commodities speculators like the Chinese one.  Africa has the same problem, and is much poorer than China.  India seems to be wary of bitcoin (perhaps by memories of Mavrodi's scams).

Jorge brings up an interesting point. 

Odalv, perhaps you can comment on whether all these federated server SC's that are in action already involve a true blockchain that are MM'd?  i doubt it.  they're probably just internal ledgers.  that doesn't sound like a true SC to me.

I've published on this matter extensively already.  Block size stagnation to preserve TOR is not sufficient reason.  (Block size is the decompressed size, network layer issues can be resolved at network layers rather than at application layer.)  I also disagree with Mircea P that Block size should be limited as an incentive to increase tx fees in order to support miners.  Miners need no such support.  We have more mining and fewer nodes than we need.

Gavin's proposal is naive wrt security, and prejudiced against increasing nodes (something the network does need), it is likely to decrease them instead.  The notion that market forces rule all and that block size will be constrained by the incremental risk of orphaning a block vis a vis the prospect of a competitive advantage from economies of scale knocking out smaller opposition is short sighted.  It creates a perverse incentive to increase block sizes and stuff them with junk to kill off smaller competitors.  
There are other technical solutions in play which may mitigate this with storage advancements and databasing and UTXO search but with the current state of things, his proposal breaks more than it fixes.  

I think, you are right.

is Sirer the advisor or a co-grad student with co-publisher Eyal?

that's possible.  but Bitcoin advances in waves.  we are ebbing right now awaiting the next tidal wave.  probably flight from some currency somewhere.

what part of the current financial system has been trouble free for the last 100 yrs?  no part.  i wouldn't make that huge a deal of the R value problem of BCI.  most of those coins got returned as well so there haven't been great losses.

that's a short term occurence

all those examples are too negative imo.  it's not simply a matter of wanting dollars.  many are holding back some BTC and Bitpay did confirm that.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2oypbo/bitpay_employee_here_around_50_of_our_merchants/

MS just accepted BTC even after their Red Ballon paper back in 2012.  i guarantee you they aren't going to tell you or i what their long range plans are but this is a turnaround:
http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/?id=156072

That seems to be an assumption some people make, but I did not see that stated in the paper.  To be meaningful, that statement would require a defintion of what is a "blockchain" and what is not.  Without such definition, I can give several "stupid answers" to that question:

* The sofa in Bitstamp's lounge is "Bitstamp's blockchain".

* Bitstamp's internal ledger, where the accounts are kept, is "Bitstamp's blockchain".

* Bitstamp can create some junk altcoin, say a bitcoin clone, that can be traded on their site; set up an old laptop to start mining its blockchain; and call that "Bitstamp's blockchain".

And also an answer that may not be so stupid:

* Bitstamp could implement @GMaxwell's scheme for "proof of solvency", using a Merkle tree (not linear, but bushy) of the account balances, updated once a day, secured by strategically inserting some hashes in the bitcoin chain; and call that tree "Bitstamp's blockchain".

The last example may show that trying to restrict what a sidechain can be and do is pointless (because there is no practical way to enforce those restrictions) and stupid (because it would arbitrarily exclude many interesting systems, perhaps even the feared "bitcoin killer")

hmm, I wonder if there are any of those left *scratches head*

Well, Ph. D. theses are often like that.   Speaking as an advisor, after I have stolen five of the best years of someone's life, it would be a crime to send him/her away with empty hands.

Seriously, I did not quite understand how Sirer's Selfish Mining attack works either, but I did not spend much time trying to.
Anyway, even if it works, it does not seem to be fatal, but only make life less fair for miners.  Or is it claimed to be worse than that?

I haven't seen the other paper you mention.


Well, I am not so optimistic about those things:

* By my understanding of the past bubbles, a new large bubble would require a new large market, comparable to that of the Chinese speculators who adopted Bitcoin in Nov/2013.

* The cryptographic security of the basic protocol, properly implemented, is assured as long as the basic tools are.  However, people can easily make mistakes when using or even implementing it.  See the recent BCI fiasco, for example.  Claiming that those problems are not bugs "in the protocol" is a weak argument; for prospective users, what matters is the system's security, not the security of the central part.  It is not reassuring to know that Chernobyl, TMI, and Fukushima were not caused by flaws in the physics of nuclear fusion, but to errors in its use.

* The blockchain traffic has been falling recently: tx/day down 18% last week, BTC/day down 44% last month, USD/day down 55%.

* VC investment is almost all in ventures that will make money no matter what happens to the price.  Most merchants who "accept bitcoin", including the large ones, do not want to touch it, they want dollars.  When asked about its future plans for bitcoin, Microsoft dodged the question.  The few minimally reliable data on bitcoin usage for e-payment through BitPay show stagnation in BTC amount over 2014, drop in USD amount.

People who argue that the block size limit should never be increased are arguing from a position of ideology, not practicality. They want as many nodes as possible, helped by low volume overhead, thinking that limiting transaction throughput can maintain Bitcoin as a guerrilla enterprise outside mainstream finance. They want it to be the financial system for the "Unsystem".

Anyone who has read my posts for the last 2 years will know that I rail against the global corruption of central banks, their fiat FRB system, inflation targeting, interest rate manipulation, crony capitalism, asset bubbles, and stealth wealth transfers from the majority to the 0.1%. I see Bitcoin is a reset button for this 100-year mess, a river to flush out the Augean Stables of central banking. However, that river can never be diverted when it is a trickle, dammed upstream.

Answer the question "Is blockchain PoW (or its variants, perhaps even PoS) a better basis for a monetary system than the existing debt-money of CB fiat?"
If "yes", then the inexorable nature of science and technology will ensure that blockchain money prevails in the long run, 10, 20, 30 years from now. So the second question is "Will the future globally successful blockchain money be Bitcoin or some other alt coin?"

The answer to the second question is "Bitcoin, unless its first mover advantage is thrown away by an unresolved fundamental failing." Failure to scale is a fundamental failing which can consign Bitcoin forever to the margins of world finance. But, why would a marginalized Bitcoin be used even by its unsystem adherents when Darkcoin or Monero offer better anonymity?

Constraining the block size, therefore transaction volumes, ignores several important aspects of the situation:

1. The quality of nodes is much better than 5 years ago. There might have been 20,000 PCs and notebooks as nodes in 2010, cpu mining and supporting the network, but was that network better than the 6500 (known) nodes of today? Many of which are owned by companies now earning a living in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Corporate nodes are much more tolerant of volumes than hobbyist nodes.

2. Bandwidth is improving in many countries at up to 40% per year, so volume increases should be acceptable up to that level, or until another constraint is seen such as cpu signature verification. Limiting it at a 2010 baseline means it is being unnecessarily constrained as computing technology is still improving.

3. Block compression techniques exist to reduce propagation overhead. IBLT was only described in 2011, a year after Satoshi put the 1MB limit in place.

4. If Bitcoin fails to scale then I-Can-Scale-Coin will incorporate the necessary changes and the ecosystem will move across to that alt instead. Sidechains do not help with scaling because SC volume still needs to be handled somewhere.

5. Despite the long bearmarket of 2014, and price down at $290 right now, a large percentage of the price assumes that Bitcoin has future scalability. That it can grow to handle a reasonable percentage of world commerce. Its SoV is predicated upon being able to scale.

Accepting the block size limit as it stands is to do the central banks a massive favor by crippling this new emerging monetary system, giving them more years to screw up the world economy, before a new alt coin can eventually prevail.

The SC's WP was disjointed to me. On the one hand, parts of it complain about alcoins, but them turns right around and gives a whole section to Freicoin, of all things. Talk about a screwed up economic policy. Adam even mentioned it again just the other day.  This tells me they are not on board with Bitcoins sound or hard money principles. Probably different guys on their team contributed different sections or thi  was a bone thrown to one of them. I seem to recall that Poelstra might be the one into demurrage. 

I'm going to stop calling you a troll despite our differences about Bitcoin. I can respect that .

The 2 papers that come to mind are Sirer's Selfish Mining paper and the Red Balloon paper from Microsoft. I've listened to Sirer talk before which is even more puzzling that he can be so pedantic about it. For Christ's sake, if you're going to stake your academic reputation on such a  theory, at least attack the network to prove it or release the code to meet everyone inspect it for flaws in reasoning or assumptions. He won't do either which should show you what the quality of his thesis is.

My problem with BS is that i think they represent the "entrepreneurs"  in Daniel's article. Those who are either underwater on their bitcoin holdings or are late to the game and feel they need to change Bitcoin in some fundamental way that will lower their risk all the while screaming everything wrong about the current system. The difficulty is in determining whether they're right, of course, as the price drop always makes everyone question their original thesis. ButiI have seen this before several time. 

To me though, as through the 5 other bubbles we've had, is the protocol still hasn't been hacked, tx's are going up, time has advanced (6yrs), dev is getting done, user adoption is growing worldwide, VC's investment continues to accelerate, and huge companies like Microsoft are coming on board.

I think the entrepreneurs need patience and need to buy in to the MC.

For a thing to be a sidechain I guess it would need to first be a chain. Can you point me to Bitstamp's blockchain?

I get it. Early adopters call you a troll because you are right. This is a problem