Topic: Inviting reasoned and civil criticism of my big-block position please? - page 2. (Read 1993 times)

Bingo - also remember that technical experts often have diminished social skills because they don't interact face to face. They engage in childish one-upmanship and penis-size wars from behind a keyboard. They live in a world where tech is God, and increasingly ignore the practical uses of bitcoin.  At this point the technical experts at Core have pretty much disappeared even from discussions on the forum. They demonstrate no leadership at all. Calls for Lightning are becoming increasingly hollow. Proposals being floated like UASF (User activated soft fork) and changing the POW (!) show their increasing desperation, and simply increase the velocity of Core's loss of credibility (even though Core is not overtly supporting those proposals, they're also not dismissing them out of hand as they should). Of course Core lives in constant fear that Unlimited will ursurp their role as custodians of bitcoin code - this would be the ultimate blow to their egos. Core likely won't ever give up on Segwit and roll back the code, because Blockstream's $75 million investment depends on it and the subsequent implementation of Lightning. They will go to the grave together.

Remember that there are many possible paths that the majority can choose - two years from now "bitcoin development" may be only the stuff of internet archives. Personally I'm OK with core version 0.12 (no Segwit, 1MB blocks) if that's the only thing we can agree on. Whoever was flooding the mempool last month has stopped (I have my theories), and transactions are flowing fine now. Bitcoin adoption is stagnating, which is sad, but it doesn't mean the end of the technology.


Peer-to-peer trustless systems have inherent limitations: each node only has the ability to process X transactions per second using Y network capacity and Z storage space. In this case, the bitcoin network's capacity has been artifically limited by 1MB blocksize before other technical limits were hit. Some argue that XYZ limits wouldn't have been hit due to a blocksize increase, and that clinging to the blocksize limit is an attempt to sell 2nd layer solutions.  Regardless of the motivation, the blocksize limit has unquestionably reduced the speed, utility, and credibility of the bitcoin network, all while increasing the cost, and Core has been completely ignoring this trend for years!

PS I don't recommend engaging with Carlton if you're looking for productive dialogue... just saying

No you will not.

The only way to limit me to your personal definition of "reasonable" free speech is to sew my mouth shut with a needle and thread.

Do not even suggest that free speech requires some arbitrator to decide on what is "reasonable" or "responsible" to define limits to that which is by definition unlimited. You are not responsible for my speech, you are responsible for your own. You will do very well to respect those boundaries, lest you manoeuvre yourself towards defining limits to your concept of "free" speech again

Non-contentious speech has never required protecting. Controversial speech is the only form of speech that needs the principle of free speech for it's protection. Your hypocritical and contradictory attack against the principles of free-speech, which you have cleverly disguised as a defence of free-speech, deserve just as fierce a denigration as Gavin Andresen's conceited attacks on Bitcoin's principles.


Don't do it again




Who is making ad hominem statements? Provide evidence

It's very simple, Gavin Andresen has made several public statements of his views on changing Bitcoin's transaction capacity that were objectively foolish.


That was all I said, and strike me with your "reasonable" free-speech stick if you dislike the way I expressed that fact.

Ad hominem arguments are not arguments at all, there is no component of ad homs that serves as justification for the label used as an ad hominem, it is a non argument that attacks an individual's character, and not the substance of what they are communicating.


I have provided full and reasoned arguments for why Gavin Andresen's arguments are foolish. I did not call the man a fool, he most certainly is not a fool.




If you're not interested in what's right or wrong, and only want a discussion where an agreement is reached, then you inherently misunderstand the debate.


This is not, and never has been, an argument about increasing capacity at a better scale, or about "which blocksize". If you do not understand that at this stage, you are at a disadvantage to make meaningful commentary in your own thread.




What mitigating circumstances from Gavin Andresen's life, exterior to the debate, can excuse him from making foolish or dangerous public statements?

Is it not your entire position that personal characteristics are not important, and that the substance of what that person says is all that's pertinent? Except, apparently, when it's convenient for you to argue the antithesis of your ostensible principles



What is the purpose of this text?

You are implying you do not speak in respect of a specific person or any specific dialogue in this thread, and yet you feel the need to spend 8 lines talking about no-one in respect of something that didn't happen? All except you are saying this specifically in reply to me?


You are the only person perpetrating ad hominem attacks (and deviously constructed as such), strawman arguments and attacks against free speech in a thread which you created yourself with the expressed (and self-contradicted) purpose to establish a high quality of debate.


There's a word for someone who behaves that way. I don't need to say it, I'm sure people who understand the form of bad faith you are exhibiting have thought of this word themselves long before this point.

There is a wedge that is being driven into the heart of bitcoin.  Anyone that tries to empathize with either side of that wedge is accused of supporting that side and of being against the opposite.  I've been accused of being a "big blocker", because I empathize with those that see merit in Unlimited.  I've been accused of being a Blockstream shill, because I empathize with those that see merit in Core.

The reality is that Bitcoin is a consensus system.  If the vast majority are happy with a particular implementation, then that implementation IS bitcoin and WILL succeed.  If that majority shrinks too much, it's not the fault of the people that are unhappy with the changes, and its not the fault of the people that want the changes.  The system starts to fail simply because people are too focused on "us vs. them" mentality, accusations, insults, fear, uncertainty, doubt, and belittling.  The system starts to fail because not enough people are focused on education, and discussion.

If Unlimited or SegWit fails, it isn't because it is an inferior solution, it's because the loudest supporters did everything they could to alienate those that didn't deify and blindly follow their side. You can't win consensus by telling your opponents off.

If Unlimited or SegWit succeeds, it isn't because it's a superior solution, it's because enough supporters finally realized that they needed to drown out the trolls and attack dogs on their own side with enough cooperation, empathy, and education to win over hearts and minds.

This isn't a technical problem, and it isn't a war.  This isn't going to be solved with a newer better technical solution, and it isn't going to be won by beating opponents into submission. It's going to be solved with consensus forming, or it's going to rip the bitcoin concept apart at the seams.

Miners are not stupid they are doing it deliberately because they are scared that SegWit+LN will cause them to lose profits.
Current status quo is great for all miners, high fees and total impasse of the situation will cause them to collect the fees for long time.
Eventually they move on, but not before earning shit ton of BTC from fees. They love fees.

Also what BW Pool is thinking signalling 8MB blocks?

the real funny part is the whole quadratics tx validations speed debate is about

a tx with ~4000 sigops. take 10 seconds
a tx with >20000 sigops takes 11 minutes.
https://rusty.ozlabs.org/?p=522

yet.

core v0.12 maxTXsigops limit=4000ops
core v0.14 maxTXsigops limit=16000ops

meaning native key malicious users can cause tx validation speeds to be more annoying, not less
also

core v0.12 maxBLOCKsigops limit=20000ops
core v0.14 maxBLOCKsigops limit=80000ops

meaning native key malicious users can cause tx validation speeds to be more annoying, AND they can fill a block with just 5 bloated txsigops of the limits. preventing any other tx getting in.

what should have been done is
core v0.14 maxTXsigops limit=2000ops
core v0.14 maxBLOCKsigops limit=80000ops

thus both bring the tx validating speed down to a few seconds at most AND making it require 40tx malicious tx's to fill a block.

my personal opinion is why does anyone need/deserve 20% of a block for 1tx. its mindboggling

and yet segwit is the same argument at best. and even worse realistically

4mb weight but only AT BEST 2x tx capacity growth.
and thats at best because it only works if people actually move funds to segwit keypairs

thus segwit is not even a proper scaling thing, even if you ignore that its a one time gesture because you cant re-segwit a segwit

---

secondly the real data behind sgwits new 'limits'
is
AT BEST 2.1mb for 2.1x capacity
so ignoring the existance of limits. segwit
1mb full data: 1x capacity
is the same as
2.1mb full data:2.1 capacity.

but we all know segwit is not about capacity and wont even get to the 2.1mb:2.1capacity 'hope' because that involves everyone using segwit keys
(the entire 46 million UTXO being on segwit keys and no one using native keys)

its also reliant on no one spamming the block. which carlton himself has revealed new spam attack vectors. and segwit has not prevented old spam attack vectors. segwit has just offered people a new keypair to voluntarily disarm itself from performing particular attacks, which malicious users will not voluntarily disarm themselves from.

I'd take such polls with a little pinch of salt:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/are-you-a-member-of-the-millionaire-club-1852232

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/do-you-own-1-bitcoin-1726836

So around 30% own more than 21 BTC, and 46% own less than 1 BTC. Don't forget to add a bit of pepper too!

I'm not seeing this as cynical at all. I'm pleased you've expressed this point as succinctly as you have. It is my position too and I'm failing at present to see flaws in this reasoning.

At the risk of being cynical myself, if we follow this through, the wiping out of the savings of small users reduces the usable currency so in a kind-of parallel to the argument small-blockers make about big miners using orphaning to push out small miners, what we have here going on right now is big hodlers gradually seeing the usable coin further reduce from 21 million (minus yet-to-be-mined, minus losses). In practical terms, losses through wiped-out savings are have the same impact on value (by reducing available coin) as losses through private-key loss. So it is in the interest of substantial hodlers that the advocates of high on-chain transaction fees continue to get their way - providing of course, that restricting the use cases to three as per Core-plan (please see OP) doesn't cause the collapse of Bitcoin altogether.

Unfortunately, I get the impression there's a not insubstantial number of hodlers of reasonable sums in the 'f*** you, I'm all right Jack' subset of ancaps / libertarians / gold-bugs. This could - and may already - be influencing the failure for this to have moved forward for so long.

Thank you, I can more-or-less follow that and it makes sense to me. I'm hoping, though I can't entirely trust myself on this, that that is more because I follow the reasoning in your logic than that I'm agreeing because we're in agreement of the harmfulness of the current block-size limit!

Thank you for the clarification - and I appreciate the manner with which you stated it.


That was absolutely not my intention and I apologise if it came over that way. What I was attempting - and have clearly failed - to accomplish was to keep the tone of the discussion as per my OP subject. Had this conversation happened between us in person, had you mentioned Gavin 'going full retard' with a few others in the room listening, participating, I may - seeing what's to be seen in your face and demeanour when talking, hearing the tone of your voice etc. - have responded with different words or in a manner that I doubt very much would have resulted in a verbal outburst such that you just wrote.

Whatever you think, I don't think speaking in this manner of someone nor speaking in the way in which you've now responded is helpful. I am not a moderator. I have no control over anything anyone may wish to say. I certainly would never wish to imply for a fraction of a second that I don't absolutely respect yours and everybody's rights to express whatever they wish.

I did not say it was unimportant. I was merely attempting to keep the tone of the conversation to that which I find most constructive.

and I will defend your right to say whatever you want in whichever way you want wherever you want (within reason). I will also defend my right to request, at least in this thread that we keep things civil and, even if by implication that we drop the ad homs. I won't either apologise for responding to something I find to be unhelpful accordingly - even if I'm wrong and Gavin actually is...... (not that I agree with you).

And I'm trying to draw attention to the fundamental and important distinction between saying something is foolish and calling someone a fool - or worse.

I'm not so interested in what's right or wrong at this stage in this context but of what's helpful in having any hope in having this conversation move towards a resolution rather than the community and the demise of the first mover.

I can follow that argument, and may agree that, all things considered, he may have been advocating for a sequence that would make more sense otherwise.

However, neither you nor I are privy to all the considerations, circumstances, understanding, even over-riding life paradigm, that Gavin did at the time. I'm happy with 'I disagree' or 'having done as much research and study as I can to understand things to the extent I do, I can see no circumstance in which what Gavin advocated makes sense' - I've made a similar statement in this thread myself about something else.

I think going as far as to say 'I'm right' is unhelpful.
Taking it to 'He's wrong' is less helpful.
Taking it to 'he must be stupid, corrupt, etc.' is less helpful.
Taking it to 'he's an absolute *Y(^&^&&**&' is less helpful.
(and not that you said this but just to complete this list)...
Taking it 'this person still has respect for him therefore he / she must also be wrong, stupid, corrupt, an absolute *Y(^&^&&**&' is less helpful still - and it is this last one that appears to be dominating most of the Reddit Bitcoin-related subreddits.

I was hoping for better than that if only in this particular thread. And to be fair, to a significant a large extent I am being rewarded - from yourself included.

Yes, that's a good way of re-stating what I mean when I say "Blocksize increases do not change the scale".



No.

Do not attempt to police my language. There is nothing wrong with describing foolish ideas as foolish, irrespective of the connotations the descriptions carry.

Gavin's original 2015 plan was foolish, but only because he decided to execute the steps in the wrong (i.e. reverse) order. His advocacy of attacking Bitcoin Core's blockchain was both foolish and reckless, and I absolutely reserve the right to denigrate that behaviour in any way I see fit.

How dare you solicit opinions, only to dismiss well-founded and demonstrated criticism as unimportant. Foolishness is foolish, recklessness is reckless. And really, Andresen was also suggesting to use overwhelming hashing power, in other words brute force, to destroy the Bitcoin project and replace it entirely with a different design of the Bitcoin software that he others favour, when there is nothing wrong with hard-forking amicably and non-destructively.

Calling that retarded is charitable, it's actually vindictive. Would you prefer that I said Gavin Andresen has behaved nastily, vindictively and duplicitiously (it's all dressed up as "I'm only trying to help") ?

Who are you to police the way I express these observable facts in respect of Gavin Andresen's recent despicable behaviour?

Forgive me for a rather cynical criticism of your big-block position.

By keeping blocksize small, we limit the blockchain to a high value settlement layer. Small payments can be made through the Lightning Network.
By keeping blocksize small, the fees for moving transactions on the blockchain escalates. This wipes out users of small UTXO's. Only large value BTC holders will be able to open and close a Lightning Network channel.
By keeping blocksize small, we have wiped out the savings of small users. These users are now completely excluded from opening and closing lightning network channels.
To enable small users to use the Lightning Network, we will have to introduce a BTC derivative token which is backed by a big BTC holders reserves.

Only for those transactions with have multiple inputs or outputs. So in the real world the validation time for a doubling in blocksize is going to be somewhere between 2 - 4 times longer. The more fragmented the UTXO set, the more it will tend towards the upper bound. And since even using big UTXO's to spend non UTXO amounts requires 1 input and 2 outputs, it is likely that it will be far higher than the lower bound.
The question is how much modern CPU's can cope with it, versus the miners risking of getting a block orphaned due to the validation time delay in releasing a block. So far miners have gone from 0.25MB, to 0.5MB, to 0.75MB to 1MB and coped. Now they can't go to 1.25MB because of an original anti-spam limit intention.

After reading above comment, this is about CPU validation time of transactions that are included in a block, and has nothing to do with hashing power.

Sorry I didn't mean that it takes 4 times longer to mine. I mean when a block propagates through the network, every node needs to download, verify and then save it. The verification part is what takes longer (and also I suppose downloading and writing the block to disk would take longer too).

Thank you. I appreciate the simplicity in the what you say  - and if this is true because of something that could be addressed such that it isn't the case, then it is what I was referring to - which, for some reason, doesn't appear to be on the wiki list of big-block objections.

But apart from the possibility that this can be somehow addressed, given hashing difficulty will adjust to accommodate increases in time, is the problem with 'time taken to process by 4'  that it becomes a race, not just of hashing power, but of the processing required before hashing can commence? Could you link me to a reference that discusses this matter (preferably one where counterarguments can also be voiced and considered).

Carlton Banks did explain to my satisfaction what he meant by it. If I understood him correctly, another way I'd describe it is if you change the scale of a map you get a lot more area shown for each increment increased. According to Carlton Banks's argument, this means at best, we get 'only' double transaction volume by doubling the block chain. For (I'll avoid the word scaling) increasing the potential transaction throughput to a number that would satisfy potential demand, we need something that does more than linear growth.

From the other heated argument above I can see there may be a reasonable case to be made that you don't even get 1-1 (throughput / blocksize) which if true, makes it even more important to find longer-term solutions - of which segwit may be one.

However, not everything has to be addressed at once and to me - as to Gavin and others - 'kicking the can down the road' by having an increase that would have prevented us from getting to what we have today - a currency dropping off on-chain use cases by the day. To this day I fail to see how it can be worth risking the totally unknown consequences of the presently worsening situation - deliberately letting it get to the stage of a ceiling-hit-forced-fee-market - in order to 'encourage' or speed up the development of second-tier solutions.

Talking of Gavin, I omitted your references to 'flaming and pretentious' and dismiss the oft-repeated 'Gavin [having gone] full retard' as an example of some of the phenomena I talk about in the last post. I'm trying to put such statements to one side and not let it colour my preparedness to listen to the reasoned arguments people who are saying such things are making. At the risk of sounding patronising, I suggest others participating here do likewise.

The time taken to process a block doesn't increase linearly with the size, it's quadratic.
If you double the blocksize, you multiply the time taken to process it by 4.
It gets very slow very quickly.

I'll answer this one first but I'm aware of the risk that more than one aspect of my response may trigger a derailing of the thread into something which was deliberately de-emphesised in my OP. So I'll request restraint here!

To be clear, I did not state I am against segwit.

I have my concerns based on technical objections I've heard for which I've not seen responses that satisfy me. However this may simply be down to the following phenomenon: that it's often easier to follow and to be convinced by the reasoning of an objection than to follow and to be convinced by what for experts may be a satisfactory response but not for me - not because of a potential weakness in the argument but because its following requires a deeper technological understanding than I possess. I realise this response opens a whole can of worms but my request here is that you accept the openness of my expression of where I am with it and not jump on the fact of my not being convinced to turn this into something else! The context is the OP please?

One of the things I'm trying to overcome when it comes to Core and Segwit is my negative emotional response to it. How do I put this?! The culture into which segwit was born is one of high toxicity. If I were to trace back to one root cause for that I'd say - in the context of my experience real face-to-face contact last night - that we are soooooooo much more likely in written discussions to assume bad faith, stupidity, corruption etc. and to respond accordingly with accusations and insults in we are in real-life conversation. I think if most of the debate had happened by the presentation of ideas followed by meetups of small groups to discuss them, we - and Bitcoin - would be in a veeery different place by now.

We saw a culture within Core (since before it was known by that name) that made some prior key contributors and respected figures in the community feel they were too at odds with where it was going that they no longer had a part in it. And I get the impression it was a small number of  convinced, possibly stubborn individuals who determined the current direction Core (it's much easier for someone passionate for the general cause and for contributing by coding to select project areas that are less controversial with the core strong-arm).

We have the possibly irreparable schism in the community which I see largely due to a choice made and followed to this day of taking a particular definition of an altcoin and using it to prevent open, balanced discussion about possible ways forward (says I, hoping my tangential reference is clear enough to make my point whilst being obscure enough for it not to derail the topic). Part of me screams that I simply don't want to see those who played a part (or who failed to take a stand) succeed - and a truly unreasonable side of me even says: '...even at the cost of the failure of Bitcoin'!

Another unhelpful human trait in this regard is the contrast between true experts in any field being quietly confident and happy to explain to those who are open to their ideas v. those who falsely believe they are experts who have an apparent need to shout loudest, to be confrontational, to accuse etc. Guess which group has the biggest influence on the directions of forums such as here and Reddit? Related to this, but I think slightly different, is another human trait - the gap between our belief of the absent or tiny role of emotion in our apparently reasoned arguments versus the actual role of emotion in those same arguments. So whilst my current quest includes trying to disentangle the merits of Core and segwit from my emotional response to them, I'm not asking here to be convinced of segwit right now. I'm asking that the points I raise in the OP to be addressed - I'm looking for things that will help me be able to see past those - and then, possibly to look at segwit differently in time.

then miners like antpool must be stupid, seeing how they signaling for a straight block size increase without knowing this or maybe what you are saying it's not 100% correct or partially missing something

no one still have correctly explained without flaming and be pretentious, why simply increase the block size MB do not scale, unless "scale" doesn't simply mean having more transaction per second

Why are you against segwit though, which will directly help the problem. Even if it doesnt solve it, it will still help it.