Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. [NooNooPol] - page 12. (Read 15354 times)

That is the road I went down (sorta) and never could come up with anything which was not, at best, highly kludgy.  Part of the reason for this is that I did not take the time to study Bitcoin in depth and never did fully appreciate some of the primitives that were being worked on within core.  I'll look for your better results.

I would rephrase that — altcoins that are not simultaneously pegged BTC side chains glory days may be coming to an end.

I believe there is an ace of the sleeve that insures altcoins will continue to exist.

One of the only 'real' risks of sidechains is that something could come along which is so obviously superior to Bitcoin as a backing store role that it would supplant it, and sidechains would open the door for it to both do so (since they need a backing store) and because they create a much more productive planter-box.

Along a similar line of reason, Bitcoin could itself be attacked successfully whereupon sidechains could just switch to something else.

To each of these 'threats', I say "um...ok."


As per the above, go for it!  Do it quick because altcoin's glory day may be coming to an end.  Or just make it a sidechain yourself from the get-go.  As I say, if it is truly exceptional and/or needed you might be the new Satoshi.

Until and iff all (or most?) of the BTC has moved out of Bitcoin Core to the superior consensus mechanism side chain. I don't know how likely that is or is not to happen. Just saying.

P.S. If one released an altcoin with such an important improvement, one might think Blockstream could just duplicate it in side chain and suck all the momentum out of the altcoin (thus "stealing work" in the sense of destroying the Inverse Commons by destroying the incentive to innovate in the Bitcoin space in a Tragedy of the Commons). They'd be wrong to assume that is necessarily the outcome. There is an ace up the sleeve.

Changing consensus _on a sidechain_ would be one of the first things I would do.  I'll look forward to seeing what you've got and expect there will be a lot of interesting things come about.  Here's the deal:

Massive sha256 hash power is what Satoshi choose as backing for Bitcoin (for better or worse.)  The equivalent would be the atomic structure of gold atoms and the difficulties involved with fucking with them.

A sidechain is simply an extension Bitcoin.  Since the sidechain relies on Bitcoin as it's backing it absorbs the backing store of Bitcoin itself without needing to do the work.

The fall-out of this is that a whole new world of consensus mechanisms, ledger structures, etc, etc are free to be explored.  Again, the solidity of a sidechain is obtained through it's Bitcoin backing.

What you want is exactly what I am driving towards (you just don't yet understand the ideal way to get what you want). You perhaps think I won't play nice in open source for the greater good, but that is incorrect. My retention has to do with making sure that capital is focused where it needs to be in order get things done, e.g. Blockstream's technology would not have been brought to market timely without $21 million in funding (well probably could have been achieved with much less but you get my point any way).

If the only thing that needed to be accomplished was to release a side chain with my new consensus algorithm, then I could just approach Blockstream and hope to get hired (virtually because I won't move). But there are other very important open source initiatives that need to be funded, which are not within Blockstream's business model scope.

Tangential skim.  From this note the above (and other things) my sense is that your ideas, priorities, etc, and mine are not well aligned in certain ways (which is fine.)

I am actually lukewarm about the consensus mechanism that Satoshi employed and see no magic at all the the 'blockchain' which is in a lot of ways a significantly inferior method of being a source-of-truth (though I find the combination to be an impressive achievement as evidenced by our conversation here today.)  Long story short, if you can improve on these things in some ways, great, but no great surprise.  Ultimately you need to piss or get of the pot and release your stuff in some manner or another in order for others (hopefully including those more competent than myself)  to do any real analysis of your ideas.

I've claimed to you before that this is not necessary because the consensus design that solves the dilemma facing us now has none of the tradeoffs that cause you to wish for that. Your wish does not solve the dilemma. Please review the following post I just made today:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.11713418


The problem is you've implicitly asked some entity to aggregate fees which is the antithesis of decentralization, i.e. you would end up with few entities controlling the bulk of the transactions fees to paid to Core. The only way to solve the dilemma is with my consensus network design.


This is covered in Appendix C of the Blockstream whitepaper (which derives from an thread where TierNolan invented the concept for decentralized exchanges). Swaps between BTC to or from scBTC. Hopefully the light bulb goes on for you now?


The main reason you need SCs is because it is the only viable means to transition BTC to a new experiment which solves the dilemma. Otherwise, my idea would be released as an altcoin which could possibly destroy BTC (believe it or not).


I see nothing wrong with the lossy option. If you don't want it, then accede to the long contest period and get a 1-to-1 transfer. If you want speed, then pay the very small lossy fee at the market rate for an atomic swap. You will likely get it back going (atomic swapping) the other direction, so it will balance out and it shouldn't be large because speculators are efficient.

That's exactly right.  Garzik couldn't have explained it any more precisely:



Bitcoin's destiny is eventually moving from emphasizing payments to becoming the settlement network for all settlement networks.

As another one who "gets it" explained:


This is the vision of the anointed.  Let us pray Satoshi will remove the scales from cypherdoc and the other Gavinista's eyes.

Chicken-shit asshole.  (Actually, I suspect it was a temporary mistake but I didn't seen an explanation.  And it's fun to antagonize the guy.)

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Let me preface my remarks by stating that I personally am fixated on keeping activity on the 'mainchain' as minimal as possible.  This to keep it super lite and the entire support infrastructure distributable mostly in terms of messenging bandwidth.  I want to minimize transactions.

Economically, I feel that if an on-chain transaction represents thousands of off-chain transactions, very generous fees can be paid to core infrastructure supporters while end-users continue to pay a tiny fee (if any) for their coffee purchases.  We then have a win/win.


I don't really understand your atomic swap ideas with out more context.  Specifically, swap what for what?  I suppose BTC for sidecoin?  If so, this is still activity on the mainchain which I wish to avoid.  With enough 'lossyness', I can imagine some efficiency, and I suppose that this is where your 30-day figures come from.  Fine, but it still seems as kludgy as anything I could come up with in my early attempts.


Speculators are the last people I would give much of a shit about (although I am one myself and intend to continue to be.)

What hit me recently was that a single transaction channel set-up would make my outlay (say 1 BTC to a micro-tipping sidechain) undesirable and anyone could verify this in the mainchain.

Yes, a market might occur for dept.  That is, someone might buy my dedicated channel funds for a discount just as someone might loan someone money who is already in debt.  This could indeed 'inflate' the Bitcoin monetary base, but it probably would not be that big a deal.  The transparency inherent in a public blockchain makes it unlikely that 'debt' would be overpriced, and it would make practical the market itself would doing it's own form of 'tainting' on UTXO's under control of unreliable parties.

I don't fully comprehend the channel actions as outlined by some of the more competent designers at this time, but it does seem to me that with two-part keys and time-lock programming, a lot of the activity to facilitate fine-grained channel flow control actually could happen off-chain.   Really interesting stuff.

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I have always had a high respect for the efficiencies that lossy systems can achieve.  This from my experience in engineering.  I would say that most parties playing in the reserve currency sphere are able and willing to play under a lossy paradigmn.  It's just standard risk management which they are competent to do.  The main thing they need is transparency.

On the other end of the spectrum, people who can lose only one dollar because they have only one dollar can also accept a lossy system.  This because if they lose 100% of their wealth they would have spent it on an energy drink the next morning anyway and needed to make another dollar picking up cans the next day no matter what.

LN seems to appreciate and adopt some of these paradigms to my delight.

It is still the case that for the many use-cases where lossy systems are not applicable, native Bitcoin remains an option (we hope.)

i think its worth it, I for one am interested to see.

6 months from now is not compatible with the BIP process, development, testing, etc.  Hearn is completely aware of this and had dropped all pretenses of 'consensus' in lobbying for a 'benevolent dictator' codebase management framework for Bitcoin.

Thus, as it stands, I believe my choices are a fairly accurate reflection of the realistic options which map to the real world.

I'll try to update my poll in conjunction with cypherdoc's going forward.  This one was put together without much time for thought but I'll try to be more a bit more thoughtful on the next one.

TPTB this is saying you would only vote yes if it were centrally controlled by gate keepers!

Then it won't happen with my consensus design for PoW because my design can't be 51% attacked. All such attacks are filtered out by a clever aspect of the design and this proof of filtering could in theory be incorporated into an SPV.

Checkmate dorc.

Cypherdorc (blew a fuse and) locked his thread, so we must continue the discussion over here...


The movement of coin assets from one chain to other can't realistically be done piecemeal at a moment's notice via the SPV (as you point out far too much risk to allow that), instead atomic swaps should be used.

The SPV proofs should only be used for those willing to accede to very long contest period, say 30 days or so.

Speculators are not going to do this for free. Thus rapidly moving assets between side chains is going to be lossy, i.e. you won't get 1 BTC for the 1 BTC you swapped (when demand exceeds supply) but going the other direction you will get more than 1 BTC (when supply exceeds demand) unless of course you accede to the long contest period.

Side chains which enforce a longer minimum contest period will have more lossy atomic swaps, but gain confidence.

I am going to notify Adam and Gregory that they need to be more realistic and incorporate this into their whitepaper.

Edit: reorganizations can also impact atomic swaps, but the losses are localized to only the parties to the swap, thus no run on the coin in general. Swap participants should set timelocks with duration appropriate to the risks they want to take.

I notice it correlated with when I wasn't posting, and then as soon as I posted, the poll went back our direction.

Clearly politics is battle of filibuster, because the minds of the voters are malleable.

I'd say more of a probe

Could be more of a 'probe' or even a 'honeypot'.  Hard to know.

With that wording, you don't seriously think he's interested in running an experiment here do you?

If you had used the exact same wording as Cypherdoc, this would have actually been an interesting experiment.  Would the polls have had statistically-significant differences?